Astra for virtuality!

The company will organize remote workplaces

Astra Group, a supplier of domestic operating systems for the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Defense, acquired IT companies Uveon and Rubekap, which deal with virtual workstations and backup solutions. The virtual workplace market has at least doubled due to the pandemic and reached about 5% of the entire IT industry, market participants estimate. There are few such domestic solutions now, and the demand for them is growing at the expense of the public sector, experts believe.



The Astra Group of Companies includes Uveon, a company developing a solution for managing Thermidesk virtual workstations, and Rubackup, a company with a backup solution RuBackup, the CEO of Astra Linux told KommersantIlya Sivtsev. The value of the transactions was not disclosed, they were completed within the budget of 3 billion rubles, planned by the group for acquisitions until 2022, said Mr. Sivtsev. According to him, the company is still considering more than ten projects for investment and co-financing.

Currently, there are not many integrated solutions in the field of virtual workplaces (VDI — Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), working entirely on domestic developments, on the market, and the most active players in this area in Russia are American Microsoft, VMware and Citrix, Ilya Sivtsev noted. At the same time, the coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated that demand for these technologies will continue to grow, he recalled. Astra Linux expects that the acquired assets will be able to reach payback within three years.

"The VDI market in Russia has received a powerful boost this year due to the pandemic: according to the most conservative estimates, this area has grown 2.5 times in our company, and we expect a twofold increase in the IT market in Russia as a whole," says Dmitry Galkin, head of VDI at Jet Infosystems . The number of requests for VDI in the first half of 2020 alone more than doubled the number of requests for the whole of 2019, said Igor Bonev, Director of Business Development at KROC's IT department. According to him, today VDI occupies about 5% of the entire IT market, with the help of these solutions, it is possible to provide any number of employees with standard workplaces in a short time and refuse to rent part of the premises, place stationary computers in them, thereby reducing rental and utility costs. In fact, this is already a new IT standard, just as virtualization of computing resources became it ten years ago, Mr. Bonev believes.

Companies that managed to implement this technology before the pandemic gained an advantage in the form of a secure organization of remote work for employees, Dmitry Galkin agrees.

According to him, the flagship products of the VDI market are Citrix and VMware, and Russian developments in functionality and reliability seriously lag behind Western ones. Domestic virtual workplace management solutions are in demand at public sector enterprises that are under sanctions or are required to use products from the registry of domestic software, he adds.

The ongoing import substitution policy may become the driver of development for a new player in the VDI market, agrees Alexey Belogortsev, head of the Advanced Technologies department at Lanit Integration (part of the Lanit Group). According to him, the key criterion used when deciding on the creation of such an infrastructure is information security policy, therefore, for some industries, such as banking, VDI is an effective tool.

It is possible that in the future, Thermidesc's capabilities will make Astra Linux the leader among developers of domestic VDI solutions, and if we add functionality for working with 3D graphics, which is in great demand in state-owned companies, then the Russian product will be able to compete with its foreign counterparts, Igor Bonev is optimistic.