Russian banks have formally imported more than half of their equipment

Large banks have moved forward in the process of import substitution of equipment, in particular servers and data centers. However, experts emphasize that most players still request support for Western solutions, and some of the equipment has become domestic, essentially by sticking Russian labels on actually Chinese devices.

A survey of specialized system integrators conducted by Kommersant showed that leading Russian banks have formally imported more than half of their equipment.

Thus, according to the director of the Informzashita anti-fraud center Pavel Kovalenko, the level of import substitution of large players has reached 60%. First of all, large and very large banks are dealing with the issue of import substitution of equipment, confirms Alexey Zotov, head of the IT infrastructure department at K2Tech. According to the presidential decree, credit organizations must replace imported equipment by 2025.

At the same time, players of the second and third levels are seriously lagging behind. The degree of import substitution of equipment for medium-sized and small banks is now below 50%, said Alexander Khonin, head of the consulting and audit department of Angara Security, on the sidelines of the conference of the Association of Information Security Standards Users.

Medium-sized credit institutions imported approximately 40% of equipment, and small ones – only 15%, Mr. Kovalenko clarifies, adding that a number of banks at the bottom of the rating have not yet started import substitution. According to Mr. Zotov, small credit institutions are planning the first purchases for import substitution of infrastructure for the fourth quarter of 2023 or 2024. The banks did not respond to Kommersant’s requests.

Experts explain that large players update equipment faster not only because of the larger amount of resources. “What makes them move more actively is being included in various sanctions and blocking lists and regulatory requirements,” explains Mr. Zotov. In addition, he clarifies, manufacturers are ready to adapt their products to large customers.

But factors that help leading banks make import substitution difficult for smaller players. “Large customers purchase significant quantities, receiving more attractive prices and leaving nothing in warehouses for other buyers,” says Fedor Muzalevsky, director of the technical department of RTM Group.

In terms of solutions, banks most quickly switched to domestic workstations and personal computers. According to Mr. Kovalenko, credit institutions of all size ranges have imported more than 60% of such equipment. The big players have upgraded their servers and data centers by about 70%, the medium ones by 45%, the small ones have just started working in this direction, replacing about 20% of the equipment. Network equipment, the expert says, has been replaced by large banks by 60%, medium-sized ones by 35%, and small ones by 15%.

At the same time, “if you open the boxes of workstations, in most cases it turns out that they became Russian by re-screwing the nameplates, like the Moskvich car,” emphasizes one of Kommersant’s interlocutors.

“According to the rules of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, conditionally domestic workstations include those that were able to score the required number of localization points, and here, apparently, the situation can be solved thanks to China – Russian labels are simply glued to Chinese hardware produced using the screwdriver assembly method in Russia,” explains Mr. Muzalevsky .- Servers and network equipment are not so easy to bring – they are monitored by vendors, since these are relatively small batches, and buying them in parts and assembling them is a big risk of incompatibility, which increases exponentially in the absence of support.”

According to Vitaly Popov, director of Softline’s infrastructure projects department, even large banks continue to receive requests for support for Western equipment.

Meanwhile, experts do not consider the situation problematic, calling it a logical transition for current conditions. The process of import substitution is a long one, emphasizes SafeTech Lab CEO Alexander Sanin, since to actually replace foreign solutions with domestic ones, “it is necessary to build high-tech factories in Russia, to develop personnel capable of designing such hardware and software.”

Yulia Poslavskaya