Three Ukrainian cloud providers — De Novo, GigaCloud, and PARKOVY — have announced the creation of an Alliance in Ukraine. The declared goal is to protect the state’s digital sovereignty and form a sovereign cloud.
Three Ukrainian cloud providers — De Novo, GigaCloud, and PARKOVY — have announced the creation of an Alliance in Ukraine. The declared goal is to protect the state’s digital sovereignty and form a sovereign cloud.
As De Novo CEO Maksym Ageev said, together the three companies, according to his estimate, cover over 80% of the IaaS (infrastructure as a service) data center infrastructure in Ukraine.
Rapid digitalization in Ukraine has significantly increased the dependence of the state and business on cloud infrastructure. At the same time, some critical services and data moved abroad during the war, which, according to the three providers, creates risks for both national security and data control.
«Data of Ukrainian citizens, the Ukrainian segment, the Internet, and so on — here we can actually draw an analogy with oil. That is, if this data remains in Ukraine, it gives impetus to the development not only of cloud providers, but of the entire IT industry in Ukraine in general,» emphasizes Volodymyr Pokatilov, director of the PARKOVY Data Center .
According to him, if we cannot preserve our sovereign data, then Ukrainian citizens will not be satisfied with the fact that, for example, their medical data is stored somewhere outside the country. And their processing is done, for example, by the same Chinese artificial intelligence systems abroad.
According to the alliance members, quite a lot of critical state data is already stored outside the country.
«All the tax is abroad. Ukrenergo is all there. Transparent. Sales,» emphasizes Maksym Ageev.
In addition, as the alliance members claim, Ukrainian services do not sign direct contracts with Amazon and Microsoft Azure. They do this through local intermediary companies. Which creates the risk of termination of services by global players at any time. Because global players provide services according to the laws of other countries. For example, the USA.
Alliance members are confident that the risk of cutting off Ukrainian services stored abroad is real, primarily due to the unstable political situation in the world.
The three providers are ready to provide customers with a common infrastructure platform based on VMware (this type of equipment is available to each of the three). This allows the cloud environment of the alliance members to function as a single space with unified approaches to security, deployment, maintenance and data exchange.
Providers are also working on creating a common service catalog, which will become a single point of entry for government agencies, IT companies, and developers looking for a reliable alternative to Western cloud giants — with a guarantee of local data placement and support for Ukrainian security standards.
As Alliance representatives say, they are able to offer the same services as Western giants. But, according to them, these Ukrainian services are under-communicated.
One of the first examples is the state-owned platform «Diya», which is deployed on the basis of data centers of the alliance members. This approach provides geo-redundancy, reliability and compliance with security criteria, which were previously achieved only by using giants like AWS or Azure.
«What is the proof that our tax system, like in Poland, is more protected than the Act? Nothing. Facts. Not talk, but what if it arrives. When it arrives, then we will talk,» emphasizes Maksym Ageyev.
Representatives of the Alliance drew a parallel: just as the country is preparing for the return of Ukrainians after the victory, it is necessary to prepare platforms for the return of data — state, medical, financial.
After the experience of 2022, when many public and private systems were destabilized during mass outages, providers have drawn conclusions. Today, cloud players claim that they can operate autonomously for up to 3–4 days without external power, thanks to generators. For their further operation, fuel will have to be delivered.
In addition, providers have sites not only in Kyiv, but also in Lviv and Europe.
Providers also commented on direct questions about communication channels with Europe. It turned out that the Ukrainian market has at least four independent trunk exits through which all traffic passes — both local cloud providers and hyperscalers.
Among the providers that provide communication are Datagroup, Retn, Cogent, Ukrtelecom, Vodafone, Kyivstar, Atracom, Eurotranstelecom.
According to cloud providers, the combined capacity of all Ukrainian cloud providers ranges from 18 to 25 petabytes. This figure is probably higher — the cloud grows by 20–30% every year, especially after a full-scale invasion.
Participants emphasized that the cloud itself only takes up about 10% of their data center capacity. The rest is classic client infrastructure, but everyone is ready to scale the cloud quickly.
«You fry! There will be fish,» joked Maksym Ageev.
The figure announced by the Alliance participants: over $100 million each year is the amount of money that public and private companies spend on cloud infrastructure outside Ukraine (only on IaaS, excluding SaaS and PaaS).
«If the same services were purchased in Ukraine, it would be at least $60–65 million, but almost all added value, taxes, and salaries would remain in the country,» say the initiative participants.
And these are jobs, taxes, and investments that today go to the economies of other countries.
«We are a poor country. Because we live in debt. And we need to produce a lot of our own things,» adds Maksym Ageev.
It should be emphasized that Ageev estimated the domestic cloud market at $120 million. That is, about the same amount as Ukrainian services currently pay to hyperscalers abroad.
So far, nothing official. According to the Alliance members, they have repeatedly appealed separately to various government agencies, but have heard one thing:
«Each of us asked. Separately. And the answer was: ‘Listen, come all together and ask once. Out loud. So we all got up together and we’ll leave,’» says Ageev.
Go get ready first at the Ministry of Digital Affairs.
The first three members of the Alliance emphasize that they are happy to welcome other providers, as well as service developers, into their association.
