The recommendations, drawn up by an industry task force under the ministry, divide data centers into three categories. K1 covers strategic facilities whose damage would disrupt state functions for an hour or more. K2 covers sites supporting economically or socially important systems at regional or sector level. K3 covers corporate data centers whose damage would affect individual companies.
For existing facilities, the document proposes reducing visibility from the air and building multi-layered protection. New strategic data centers should be placed underground or in bunkers, according to the recommendations. Structures must ensure the safety of machine halls, cooling systems and power supply.
Other measures include engineering barriers, anti-drone nets and electronic warfare equipment. Buildings should be protected against blast waves and shrapnel, and critical data and services duplicated with backups. The document also provides for a single situation center for operators to coordinate with the Defense Ministry, the Emergency Situations Ministry, the National Guard and emergency services.
A source cited by Kommersant estimated that the additional security measures could raise the cost of facilities by 5–10%, with provider service prices rising by up to another 10%. A serious attack could destroy up to 87% of a data center's value and cause months of downtime. Rising electricity tariffs, equipment shortages and the high key rate are also putting pressure on prices.
Yandex, VK, Selectel and Cloud.ru declined to comment on the recommendations, and Sberbank did not respond to the newspaper's request. Market participants interviewed by Kommersant mostly assessed the measures as effective. According to the newspaper, after a recent wave of attacks operators have already begun installing anti-drone nets at their facilities.
The recommendations were prompted by a series of drone attacks on data centers in October. On October 8, a Yandex facility in Sasovo in the Ryazan Region was seriously damaged and stopped operating entirely. On October 9, part of the infrastructure of a data center in Kaluga was disabled, and on October 11 the company reported the shutdown of its site in Vladimir. The attacks caused widespread disruptions to Yandex services and those of its clients; according to the company, no employees were injured.
On October 14, drones struck a Sberbank data center under construction in Balakovo in the Saratov Region, and on October 18 they hit a VK data center in the Leningrad Region. Both companies confirmed the attacks, saying their services continued to operate normally. As Kommersant reported, the incidents worsened Russia's shortage of computing capacity.
On October 21, the Ministry of Digital Development announced the creation of a special task force to protect communication networks from external attacks. The Ukrainian side says strikes on Russian data centers are a response to similar Russian attacks: in late September Russian forces began striking Ukrainian data centers and communications nodes, and on October 9 Volodymyr Zelensky described the attack on Yandex's infrastructure as a retaliatory measure.