Telegram Ban Forces Russian Tech Companies to Migrate to Domestic Cloud Services

Russian startups forced to switch to expensive domestic cloud services following Telegram blocking

This primarily affects small Russian startups, which has severely impacted their profitability as cloud service maintenance costs have skyrocketed several times over. According to Alexey Vagin from Ekvio, before the Telegram ban, all user data was stored on Russian clouds, but computing power was sourced from Amazon and Google Cloud, which is significantly cheaper. However, following the ban on a massive number of IP addresses from foreign cloud services, IT companies are now forced to migrate to domestic cloud solutions. As Alexey explains with a simple example:

If your website has around 40,000 active users, you can purchase a configuration from Google Cloud for $330 per month, but if you buy a similar configuration from us, it will cost you almost $1,000.

As a result, the additional annual costs for maintaining their websites increase to an astronomical 4 million rubles. Another IT business representative, Vladimir Shcherbakov, CEO of Teachbase, states that they have already lost approximately 1 million rubles to date.

Recall that after blocking approximately 19 million IP addresses to prevent users from accessing Telegram, by June 15th, around 4 million IP addresses remained blocked. However, Russian companies are not rushing to return to Google or Amazon clouds, as the probability of a second wave of mass blocking is extremely high.

Large corporations, on the other hand, have not suffered as severely from the Telegram ban. Major companies employ IT specialists who develop proprietary solutions that don't rely entirely on cloud services. Additionally, they have backup communication channels to prevent information leaks, which helps mitigate the negative impact of blockades. Currently, Russian companies' losses from the Telegram ban total 1 billion dollars, while Google and Amazon have lost approximately 900 million dollars.