Dec 12, in Moscow, the police raided the NGINX (the company behind most popular web-server in the world) office and detained the company’s founders — Ilya Sysoev and Maxim Konovalov. The reason was the copyright violation claim from Rambler Group.
The Internet-corporation did not have any questions for NGINX for many years, however, it decided to file a claim for author rights violation right after F5 acquired NGINX for $670M. The base is the fact that the NGINX founder (Igor Sysoev) was an employee of Rambler when he started to create NGINX web-server.
Just for the information - nginx is the world’s #1 web-server, which’s in use in 33% of all websites worldwide.
Igor Ashmanov (former Rambler CEO, who hired Igor Sysoev) said that
"when we hired Sysoev, it was agreed that he had some personal project and he’d work on it. The name was something like mod_accel, he renamed it to Nginx in 2001-2002. He worked in Rambler as the sysadmin and his job duties did not include any software development at all".
Probably because of this statement and active highlighting in mass media, Igor Sysoev and Maxim Konovalov were released by police and qualified as witnesses.
German Gref, the head of Sberbank (the largest Russian bank that acquired this summer 46.5% of Rambler Group) also commented negatively:
"I don't like that this is a criminal investigation. Such cases should be ruled by the commercial court".
Anyway, unfortunately, that’s another fact proving that any moment your office in Russia can be raided by law enforcement. Equipment can be seized, employees can be detained and as a result, the company’s operations can be broken for an unpredictable time. And it will not really matter to you — were these actions done by justified reasons or not and from whose point of view.
Having this in mind, it makes sense to consider migrating business-critical infrastructure outside of Russia. It can be true both for large enterprises and for individual developers.
F5 Networks representatives officially commented:
"Our products and code are top priorities for F5 and NGINX. Promptly following the event we took measures to ensure the security of our master software builds for NGINX, NGINX Plus, NGINX WAF and NGINX Unit—all of which are stored on servers outside of Russia. No other products are developed within Russia. F5 remains committed to innovating with NGINX, NGINX Plus, NGINX WAF and NGINX Unit, and we will continue to provide the best-in-class support you’ve come to expect".
You should store personal data of Russian citizens in Russia — in accordance with local regulations. But keep everything else outside and make your operations on physical or virtual servers using local workstations just as a remote terminal. That would save your data from unexpected equipment loss.
You will be able to restore the work processes from anywhere, no matter where you are now. We’ll be happy to help you with designing and building a secure IT infrastructure for your business.