Security has gone public – Newspaper Kommersant No. 202 (7403) of 10/29/2022

Departments and state-owned companies have reduced the volume of purchases of information security services at open tender sites, follows from the Informzaschita report. On the one hand, public statistics could be spoiled by the transition of many state-owned companies to closed-door purchases, but on the other hand, experts point to the presence of objective factors for a temporary decrease in the activity of state-owned companies in such an important area.

State customers are reducing purchases of services in the field of information security, follows from the report of the Informzaschita company, which Kommersant has read. Analysts of the company analyzed purchases by departments (according to the FZ-44 law) and state-owned companies (according to FZ-223) at five tender sites from January to September of this year. It follows from the report that in monetary terms, the total amount of placed tenders decreased by 28% year-on-year (47.9 billion against 66.3 billion rubles), the number of tenders decreased by 14% (11.6 thousand against 13.5 thousand .). The trend is partly confirmed on the Roseltorg trading floor: a company representative said that over this period the number of lots decreased by 13%.

The decrease in indicators may be caused by the transfer of many tenders to a closed mode, said Vladimir Lishenkov, general director of the RTS-Tender trading platform. “Transfer of purchases to other, closed, sites” names one of the possible reasons for the observed trend and the head of the information security development department at Softline Group of Companies Mikhail Malyshev. According to the March government decree No. 301, the purchases of companies subject to sanctions are no longer published in the Unified Information System, remind RTS-Tender.

In the past two years, public procurement of information security services has grown steadily. At the end of 2020, the volume of such purchases in monetary terms increased by 6% compared to the previous year, and in 2021 – by 27%.

Since the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine at the end of February this year, the Russian IT infrastructure has been constantly subjected to cyberattacks: from attacks on the server (DDoS) to mailings of malicious emails containing encryption viruses. So, on March 26, Rosaviatsiya was subjected to a hacker attack, as a result of which the document flow of the department suffered, which was forced to switch to paper media (see Kommersant of March 28).

In addition to the transfer of public procurement in the field of information security to a closed mode, the decrease in public indicators may also have actual market reasons related to the transfer of this entire area to Russian solutions, experts point out. “On the one hand, customers cannot quickly rebuild systems and repurchase Russian solutions, and on the other hand, it is impossible to rebuild the development of new solutions in Russia to increase the volume in such a short time,” Informzashita says. To switch to domestic security systems, they must be tested before implementation, customers have begun to take a more thoughtful approach to building a further strategy, explains Andrey Zaikin, head of information security at Croc. State-owned companies were unable to plan purchases due to the lack of the possibility of implementing cybersecurity solutions without piloting, Nikolai Fokin, director of the Information Security Center of LANIT-Integration (part of the LANIT group), agrees. “I think that companies have gone through a smooth replacement of equipment and solutions in the field of information security,” he sums up.

“We understand that the number of cyber threats will increase along with the growth in the number of digital services, so we do not plan to reduce the amount of investment in cybersecurity,” Russian Post told Kommersant. Rostec declined to comment.

Tatyana Isakova