Russian Firms Reserve Foreign Cloud Space After Drone Strikes on Data Centers
Demand for hosting capacity in Kazakhstan and other neighboring countries has surged as Russian companies seek backup sites following October attacks in six regions.
By Meera Fletcher ·
Russian companies have begun reserving storage and processing capacity in foreign data centers after drone strikes damaged major facilities inside Russia. Demand for these external sites has increased sharply since October, when attacks targeted infrastructure in six oblasts of European Russia. The shifts affect the Vladimir, Kaluga, Leningrad, Nizhny Novgorod, Ryazan, and Saratov regions.
Yevgeny Svidersky, Vice President for Cloud Services at ITGlobal.com, told the newspaper Kommersant that businesses are showing strong interest in sites in Kazakhstan and other locations. Other sources confirmed that several Russian firms have already started the migration process to these foreign platforms. The companies stated that data center accidents are no longer a hypothetical risk. They are currently reviewing their business continuity strategies to find backup sites that operate on networks and energy infrastructure separate from their main data centers.
Ukrainian forces targeted data centers operated by the tech giant Yandex and other companies during the October strikes. One attack hit the Sasovo area in Ryazan Oblast, causing a fire at the Sasta plant where a Yandex data center is located. Yandex reported that this specific facility completely suspended operations following the morning strike. On October 9, the company reported a new attack on a data center in Kaluga. Two days later, on October 11, Yandex announced the suspension of operations at a site in Vladimir due to another drone attack.
Yandex engineers have restored access to 97.16% of customer data on Yandex Cloud following the attacks. The company stated that the remaining 2.84% of data is unrecoverable because the equipment was severely damaged. Customers had not created backups for this affected data on the platform. Yandex noted that customers previously had to enable backups manually, but the service now enables backups by default for new virtual machines.
The company is spreading its computing resources across new sites in several Russian regions to reduce risk. Russian leader Vladimir Putin signed a decree obliging owners of non-state data centers to reserve 10% of their capacities. This measure aims to ensure the uninterrupted operation of Russia's IT infrastructure.
The October strikes marked a change in how Russian tech firms view physical infrastructure risks. The migration to foreign capacities represents a practical response to the physical damage sustained by key facilities in central Russia. Companies are prioritizing locations that offer geographical and infrastructural separation from their primary operations.
