With two months of data storage left, Russia faced with acute IT crisis

As Western cloud providers pull out of Russia, the country is left with only two more months of data storage before they run out of it.

The Russian government is exploring various options to resolve this IT storage problem - ranging from leasing all available domestic data storage to seizing IT resources left behind by businesses that pulled out of the country. These solutions were proposed during a meeting held at the Ministry of Digital Transformation that was attended by representatives of Sberbank, MTS, Oxygen, Rostelecom, Atom-Data, Croc, and Yandex.

According to the Russian news outlet Kommersant, the parties during the meeting estimated that they have roughly two months left before running out of available storage space. Owing to sanctions imposed, all Western cloud storage services had to cut business ties with the country resulting in Russian firms to turn to domestic cloud storage service providers.

For example, the locally-sourced storage capacity needs of Russian mobile carrier MegaFon increased fivefold, MTS tenfold, and VK had to seek 20% more storage resources in just a week. There are not enough data centers in Russia to accommodate the needs of local operators; hence, a national solution for the Russian storage crisis is needed.

Kommersant further explains that the situation coincides with public Russian agencies' storage needs growing exponentially due to "smart city" projects involving extensive video surveillance and facial recognition systems.

Last week, the Ministry of Digital Development amended the Yarovaya Law (2016) to suspend a yearly requirement for telecom operators to increase storage capacity allocations by 15% for anti-terrorist surveillance purposes. Another move that could free up space would be to demand ISPs abandon media streaming services and other online entertainment platforms that eat up precious resources.

Thirdly, there's the option of buying out all available storage from domestic data processing centers. However, this will likely lead to further problems for entertainment providers who need additional storage to add services and content.

Russia is also considering seizing IT servers and storage left behind by companies who pulled out of Russia and integrating them into public infrastructure.

The final option would be to tap into Chinese cloud service providers and IT system sellers, but this is currently complicated because China has not yet decided how much it's willing to help Russia and in which sectors.