Russian Firms Lock Up Cloud Space Abroad After Drone Hits

Russian tech firms are moving computing resources to foreign data centres to protect against physical damage to domestic infrastructure. This shift follows a series of drone strikes on major server facilities in October that disrupted operations across six regions.

Yevgeny Svidersky, Vice President for Cloud Services at ITGlobal.com, told Kommersant that demand for capacity in Kazakhstan and other neighboring countries has risen sharply. Other industry sources confirmed that several Russian companies have already started migrating their data to these external sites.

The attacks targeted key facilities in Vladimir, Kaluga, Leningrad, Nizhny Novgorod, Ryazan, and Saratov oblasts. Ukrainian forces struck data centers operated by Yandex and other providers. On October 9, Yandex reported an attack on a facility in Kaluga. Two days later, on October 11, the company suspended operations at a data center in Vladimir due to a separate drone strike.

A major incident occurred in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast, where drones hit the Sasta plant housing the Yandex DC LLC data center. The impact caused a fire, and the facility completely suspended operations. Yandex stated that the damage to equipment was severe enough that 2.84% of customer data on Yandex Cloud remains unrecoverable. Engineers have since restored access to 97.16% of that data.

The loss of data occurred because customers had not enabled backups for the affected servers. Yandex noted that users previously had to turn on backups manually. The company has changed this policy, enabling backups by default for all new virtual machines. It is currently spreading its remaining computing resources across new sites in several Russian regions.

Businesses are now reviewing their business continuity plans to ensure backup sites are independent of the main data centre's network and energy infrastructure. Vladimir Putin signed a decree requiring non-state data centre owners in Russia to reserve 10% of their capacities to support the country's IT infrastructure.