Despite recent reports that Microsoft was all set to ban Russian companies from its suite of cloud services as of March 20, this still appears not to be in effect, but should be by the end of March 2024 – this week – after the company held discussions with IT platform Softline, one of its customers.
As a reminder, the ban is not a political move by Microsoft, but several cloud storage providers’ hands are forced by economic sanctions imposed by the European Union on Russian-owned companies back in December 2023 as a result of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
The latest update on the impending blockade, from BleepingComputeris that the delay so far only appears to be something Microsoft is offering, in response to correspondence with Softline, despite the latter’s press release (Russian, machine translated by us) last week in which it claimed that it has “all necessary means” to ensure a smooth transition to its own infrastructure of Microsoft and Amazon services.
EU economic sanctions against Russian technology
Before the renewal, in a letter that Softline has since published on its Telegram channel, Microsoft graciously broke the news to Softline, but stated its “(commitment) to compliance with EU trade laws and regulations, as well as all other jurisdictions in which the company is committed to’. operates’.
This was reported by the Russian news agency TASSMicrosoft is about to cut off access to more than 50 of its products to Russian companies, including video conferencing software colossus Microsoft Teams And cooperation instrument suite Microsoft365.
Not to mention the collateral damage caused by providers like Google and Amazon withholding their own services without delaying the deadline. BleepingComputer also revealed that business customers of these Russia-based companies received a service termination notice last week.
It is still too early to say whether the sanctions will be effective in putting pressure on Russia to withdraw from the conflict: for example, they could only increase the popularity of local cloud and IT providers among companies and can stimulate their expansion.
But regardless of the European Union’s ruling, there is one upside to all this: individuals and solo professionals based in Russia who use cloud services from this and similar cloud services will not be affected.