Yes, but depending on the type of cloud service, the effect differs.
The ban would be most effective on data storage, less on computational capacity and software transfers via the cloud.
On the first, the data storage, Russia is “the victim” of its own creation, the compliance factor.
FZ-152, the data protection law, requires that all personally identifiable information (PII), or at least its copy, be stored on data servers located in Russia. In 2020 Russia’s share in global cloud storage market accounted for 1%, but the cloud services boomed in 2019-2021, with 23% year-over-year growth rate in 2021. That created huge bottlenecks in data centre capacity, particularly in the spheres of public usage, like face recognition ticketing in Moscow metro. The biggest consumers of data centres in Russia are the energy sector (80%), IT (78%), public (70%), telecom (70%), oil and gas (65%).
Thus, limiting the access of the booming cloud services sector (mainly IT, transport and logistics and food industry) to global cloud storage market, would squeeze them to the domestic market, which is already under pressure. Yandex.Cloud, the dominant Russian cloud services provider, is already banned from most of the western markets and thus scrapped of its main revenue sources. With its six data centres in Russia, it has reached its limits. There is a large monopolisation of the traditional data centre services, which would be easier to target.
Because of cost effectiveness, the cloud computing and software transfers have been mostly used by Russian start-up companies operating in the market for up to five years. Moreover, the software transfers had already been under the ITAR and the EAR trade control restrictions for Russian users of more critical importance. Banning cloud computing should be carefully considered as it would also deprive the Russian free society, whatever is left of it there, of some of the cloud services, like VPN, that are out of the authorities’ control.
It should also be considered that AWS, Google Cloud and Azure which together account for 61% of the global public cloud market, have during the last years accumulated a substantial amount of client data that is stored in Russian data centres. The possible countermeasures following the ban should be mitigated.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-cloud-services-russia-banned-clyde-kull-1f/