OREANDA-NEWS  According to the preliminary assessment of iKS-Consulting, at the end of 2018, the Russian market of cloud services grew by 25% compared to 2017 and reached 68.4 billion rubles.   Main market volume — up to 70% - was in the segment of Software as a Service (SaaS, software that works in the cloud, users get access to it via the Internet). In the coming years, this market will grow by an average of 23% per year and by the end of 2022 can reach 155 billion rubles, according to the study of iKS-Consulting.

Analysts point out that Russia has become an exporter of cloud services: the share of foreign customers in the revenue of domestic cloud providers is 5.1%, or 2.4 billion rubles., in the SaaS segment. In the revenue segment of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS, servers, data warehouses, networks, operating systems in the cloud that customers use to deploy and run their own software solutions), foreign customers accounted for 2.2%, or 380 million rubles.

As explained development Director of iKS-Consulting Dmitry Gorkavenko, some foreign companies are interested in cloud services of Russian providers because of the need to store data in Russia: in particular, to meet the requirements of the law "on personal data", which obliges to process such information in the country. "If the company has no desire or ability to physically place a rack with storage equipment in the Russian data center, it can buy a cloud storage service from one of the local cloud providers," Gorkavenko said.

Also, foreign customers are in demand cloud accounting software and virtual automatic telephone stations.

Among foreign customers there are video services. "YouTube (owned by Google) or Netflix is advantageous to have in Russia CDN-resources (Content Delivery Network — network infrastructure that allows to optimize the delivery and distribution of content). So, if somewhere in Russia someone watches a popular video on YouTube, it is advantageous for the service to store it in the cache on a server located in the country. In this case, when the next user from here wants to watch this video, it can be downloaded from this server, which will save YouTube Time and money for content delivery," Dmitry Gorkavenko explained.