Russian companies seek overseas data centers after Ukrainian drone strikes

Yevgeny Svidersky, vice president for cloud services at ITGlobal.com, told Kommersant that demand for overseas data center capacity had risen significantly after several major Russian facilities came under attack.

Businesses are considering locations including Kazakhstan, he said. Two other industry sources confirmed that some Russian companies had already begun moving parts of their data and IT infrastructure abroad.

The attacks have prompted companies to reassess the risks of relying on domestic facilities, particularly when backup systems share the same power and network infrastructure as their primary data centers.

"Companies are reviewing their approaches to business continuity and looking for a backup site that does not depend on the network and power infrastructure of the main data center," Svidersky said.

In October, Ukrainian drone strikes targeted data centers associated with major Russian companies and institutions, including Yandex, VK, Sberbank and the Federal Tax Service, according to The Moscow Times.

The reported attacks affected facilities in six regions of European Russia: Vladimir, Kaluga, Leningrad, Nizhny Novgorod, Ryazan and Saratov.

The disruption was particularly significant for Yandex, one of Russia's largest technology companies.

In a Nov. 10 statement, Yandex said its engineers had restored access to 97.16% of affected Yandex Cloud customer data following the attacks. The remaining 2.84% could not be recovered because of severe equipment damage and the absence of customer-enabled backups.

The company said it had since made automatic backups the default for newly created virtual machines and deployed additional computing resources at sites across Russia.

The growing interest in overseas backup facilities suggests that Ukrainian strikes are forcing Russian businesses to rethink how they protect critical digital operations, even when they intend to keep their primary infrastructure inside the country.