Think global, go local! And we truly believe in it. We jump into local areas of our customers and reinforce the partner ecosystems according to these principles.
Russian market increases business possibilities and attracts international enterprises over the globe. Local data regulations such as FZ-152 might be a challenge to expand businesses in Russia.
So, today we want to share with you a couple of insights from an interview with one of our trusted cloud partners – Yandex.Cloud.
As a professional in the information security area, both regulations and practical aspects, Mikhail was able to provide InCountry with comprehensive answers to a series of most frequently asked questions and recommendations that need to be followed.
Before going for a cloud computing platform what are the essential things to be taken into concern by users?
It is critical to understand the areas of shared responsibility. Systems using cloud services require security responsibilities to be divided and shared by the client-owner of the system and the provider-owner of the cloud infrastructure used by the system. This division changes based on the cloud service model used by the client system (IaaS, PaaS). Be concrete here as much as you can. Follow the principle: “several companies/persons are responsible for something” means “no one is responsible”.
Do your homework: Prepare the new threat and intruder models considering things described and discussed above. Choose the appropriate security tools and solutions. Which ones will be provided by the cloud provide? Who will be responsible for their administration?
There’s a number of other concerns we can’t list here because of lack of time but the main idea is to keep in mind the new cloud setup of data processing.
Talk about Yandex.Cloud’s strengths and how does it stand compared with other cloud providers?
Let’s talk about several points.
Yandex.Cloud is a part of Yandex
- Yandex – IT leader in Russia.
- One of the largest internet companies in Europe listed on NASDAQ with a market capitalization of $13,5 billion.
- Russia’s largest internet business with 47 billion RUB in revenue for Q1 2020.
- Leader in search requests – 58,1% share of search queries in Russia, on average for Q1 2020.
- Services with millions of users. Daily active users (DAU) on the search portal – 33 million, Yandex.Market – 4 million, Yandex.Taxi – 4.5 million, September 2019.
We use our own physical infrastructure
- Yandex.Cloud has 3 data centers in Russia (while the main international players don’t).
- Geographically distributed data centers located over 300 km away from each other.
- Yandex.Cloud is hosted in 3 availability zones.
- An independent power supply system in each data center.
- Tbps bandwidth provided by our own DWDM fiber network.
We collaborate with hardware vendors to provide our customers with the best service
- Racks designed for data centers; data centers designed for racks.
- Internal hardware designed to accommodate permissible operating temperatures.
Yandex.Cloud pays a lot of attention to compliance procedures
- Compliance with PII Law in Russia.
- Compliance with GDPR in the EU.
- PCI DSS – Data center compliance.
- ISO/IEC 27001, 27017, 27018.
Some market numbers
- Yandex.Cloud – fastest growing cloud provider in Russia (2020 results).
- Cloud revenues increased 4.3x compared with Q4 2019.
- The number of clients increased in 2020 compared to 2019 by 1.4 times (9,700 clients).
- The average check per customer increased threefold in 2020.
About our services
- Specialists from Yandex and Yandex.Cloud actively contribute to open source community and many of these developments form the basis of our services.
- Dozens of platform and infrastructure managed services.
- Various Managed Databases (PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse, MongoDB, etc.)
- Serverless services – Cloud Functions.
- ML & AI services developed in Yandex which can definitely be compared with big players by quality.
- Managed Elasticsearch from Yandex.Cloud. We are one of the six authorized cloud partners in the world.
- Yandex.Cloud also offers unique business tools that were developed based on Yandex’s experience and are used throughout the whole company such as Tracker or DataLens.
What steps does Yandex.Cloud take to protect customers’ data?
Yandex.Cloud security employs a set of security tools at different levels to safeguard against a single threat. This approach increases the cost of any potential attack and lets us quickly identify and prevent unauthorized activities of attackers.
Yandex.Cloud complies with local regulatory requirements and meets industry standards.
We provide comprehensive security for our cloud infrastructure: physical security (own data centers, own communication channels, video surveillance, regulated access, etc.), monitoring, data protection (encryption, guaranteed deleting data, etc.).
We implement security solutions for our customers (Identity and Access Management, Firewall, Key Management System, Certificate Management, Audit, etc.) and develop the marketplace with popular security solutions provided by our partners (Check Point, Open VPN, Wallarm, Kaspersky, etc.)
How do you view the Yandex.Cloud and InCountry partnership?
First, it’s critical for every company working with Russian customers to be compliant with local law and don’t make the life of their users and customers harder. I believe together we can solve this problem.
There’re a huge number of services for different purposes which can be used by customers according to their own business reasons and vision. And a significant part of them is not available locally because of different reasons. Yandex.Cloud is the mature cloud platform and can host the customer data and parts of these services locally. InCountry has the expertise of creating solutions for a distributed cloud, enabling data residency and localization solutions. Together we can land every service locally, make it compliant according to Russian law, and transparent for the end customer.
From this point of view, our partnership looks very promising and potentially would bring a lot of benefits to our customers.
What would you say to global companies considering entering the Russian Federation market?
I’ll take the liberty of saying that it’s not very specific to Russian market and dictated by common sense. Don’t be afraid, schedule a time to make some research before entering the market, find a partner with good knowledge and reputation, be sure that you put the customers’ data first, design and implement your product or service according to this concept, be sure that you could handle the data according to the law and you have enough capacity.
If you have any questions related to data localization in Russia, please contact us at sales@incountry.com