Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree allowing a special government committee, in consultation with the Federal Security Service, to approve the use of data centers outside Russia. The move creates an exception to the country’s Sovereign Internet Law, which prohibits Russian companies from using cloud-computing infrastructure beyond the country’s borders. It also highlights the risks of Russia’s increasingly centralized internet infrastructure, which has suffered significant disruption after Ukrainian drone attacks.
Russia’s centralized internet faces wartime disruption
Russia has pursued a sovereign and increasingly closed internet, concentrating many digital services among several Russian technology companies, including Yandex. That highly centralized system has proved vulnerable during the war.
Ukrainian drone attacks on key Russian data centers caused widespread disruption to popular payment and digital banking applications, e-commerce platforms, video-streaming services, ride-hailing and food-delivery apps, and other online services.
Yandex was also forced to relocate all three of its major supercomputers after a Ukrainian drone attack targeted the AI data center where the machines were originally housed, Meduza reported.
Ukraine relies on distributed infrastructure
By comparison, Ukraine’s decentralized digital services have proved more resilient despite years of Russian drone and missile attacks. This resilience has been supported by government policy that distributes critical energy and telecommunications nodes and places more supporting infrastructure underground.
US technology companies Amazon and Microsoft provided a major boost to that effort. Shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, the companies supported the migration of Ukrainian government resources to cloud infrastructure, helping preserve critical digital services and other government operations outside the country.
The Ukrainian government also used SpaceX’s Starlink satellite terminals as a backup communications system. The terminals were paid for by the United States and European countries, including Poland and Germany.
Source: arstechnica.com