A question for the particularly advanced: is there light at the end of the IT tunnel?
Digitalization.RU
The clinch that Russia entered into with the West turned out to be especially sensitive in high-tech areas, including the IT sphere. No one needs to be convinced that this sector of our country's economy, despite everything, continues to develop quite confidently.
It is necessary to convince that this sector is currently more Russian than imported, even taking into account the notorious "substitution". It is impossible to do without imports at all, but if the proposed text were at all targeted, it could generally be taken for advertising.
The authors did not plan to propagandize for “our people,” and especially for officials. But so far, they have mostly gotten it from us for doing nothing when “our people are being beaten.” But those articles – Atmosphere in the IT sector: “Not another word in Russian” – were more of a political and economic nature, but it’s time to talk about technology.
Moreover, against the backdrop of incessant cyber threats and sanctions pressure from the collective West, our programmers, like those unsung heroes, quite often achieve outstanding results in their work. The technological fruits of this work help not only the fighters on the front lines, but also the most ordinary users every day.
Even before the start of the SVO and broad, or rather deep Western sanctions, Russian IT specialists proved that the devil is not as scary as he is painted. Thus, programmers have already solved a number of problems that allow us today in practice not to notice imposed technological limitations.
The unconditional milestones on this path were: the creation of an independent national payment infrastructure – an alternative to the monopoly giant SWIFT, the active development of browser technologies after the removal of applications from stores, and the development of domestic office programs.
The whole "World" and SBP
Again, the MIR system is advertised by many, but not by us. The programmers were given the task of ensuring the financial and technological independence of the country. How it has been implemented, although clearly not completely, we are all checking in practice today.
Given the rapid pace at which digital finance is developing today, the creation of a national payment system was essentially a necessary preventive measure. No one could rule out not only the removal from SWIFT, but also the "accident" of suspension of foreign Visa and Mastercard in our country.
Which is what eventually happened in 2022. Russian IT specialists created the Mir system, and its development and improvement has been ongoing since 2015. Initially, it was focused on ensuring transactions within Russia, but now our system's cards are accepted in other countries, including the UAE, Vietnam, Cuba, Armenia, and Belarus.
According to Skolkovo, three years ago Mir overtook its foreign analogues in terms of population coverage in Russia, which once again emphasizes the convenience of the system and how necessary and significant its development was.
An equally important achievement of our programmers is the well-known Fast Payment System (FPS), created with the participation of the Bank of Russia. Today, almost half of the residents of our country regularly use contactless payment via QR code, if not more - we simply do not have the data yet.
Technologies allow the average user not to even notice the cessation of Apple Pay in our country, and the creators of the project have proven that we can no longer be intimidated by such removals and stoppages.
Consumers already know that now with the help of SBP they can pay for any product or service and make an instant transfer by phone number to themselves or to another person. SBP is actively integrated into Russian online cash registers, which emphasizes its crucial role for domestic business.
WEB – not only for banks
When transnational payment systems suspended their work on the domestic market, the collapse of the banking system, as we know, did not happen. Financial organizations continued to work and develop, including thanks to thousands of people who work every day to make our lives easier and more convenient with the help of IT technologies.
Judge for yourself: if you find yourself in the notorious Germany or Switzerland, countries that are supposedly proud of their financial systems, you can be horrified when you open any banking application. It’s good if they allow you to find out your account balance and perform a couple of simple transactions that can take from a few hours to a couple of days.
And if you suddenly need to do something more complicated than a basic translation, go to the office, which is open only on weekdays, six hours a day, with a lunch break. Meanwhile, domestic IT specialists have managed to make truly worthy services out of banking applications.
Judge and try it yourself - a Russian may not visit a bank branch at all in a year, the vast majority of actions from paying for housing and communal services to opening a deposit can be done literally without getting up from the couch. Such developments are not embarrassing to show to anyone with the words: "We can do it!"
However, with the sanctions flywheel spinning, restrictions from abroad are increasingly affecting the lives of ordinary Russians. Recently, the US Treasury Department blacklisted 50 Russian financial institutions at once. This means that their mobile applications immediately became unavailable for download from the App Store and Google Play.
In fact, there is not a single banking app left in the app stores. The situation is not very pleasant, but not fatal. No blocking or deletion is scary even for iPhone users, because our programmers have learned to work miracles in Web development.
So, for those who haven't yet learned, we'll explain briefly. If you log into the Internet bank in the browser of almost any Russian bank, it will be difficult to distinguish it from a mobile application. They have everything for convenient daily banking.
This approach — to take and transfer the entire functionality of a full-fledged program to a web page — is absolutely in the spirit of the famous Russian ingenuity. The development of web versions of banking applications does not allow Russia's rivals to influence the country through the infrastructure of Google and Apple.
Import substitution – without leaving your office
Another headache for all domestic companies – from defense industry enterprises to small businesses – was the termination of licenses for office programs from Microsoft. Even suppliers of the most important technologies for the country turned out to be extremely dependent on the usual Excel and Word, and the lack of an adequate replacement could actually paralyze many critical processes for a while.
However, a replacement was found - and very quickly. Before the Americans had time to finally leave our market, several developers immediately presented ready-made solutions that allow you to get off the needle of Bill Gates' brainchild. And Russian Words and Excels are much safer, the risk of leaking corporate or even state secrets in them is minimal.
And Western office products, as practice shows, are ready to simply steal user data and use it for their own purposes. Considering other people's information as their own has long become a habit for European and overseas developers, and there is no need to even ask whether the user wants to share such data.
It remains to be noted that we have not replaced the American monopolist with a similar domestic one. Competition is already clearly visible in this segment, and this is the key to healthy development. In fact story with office programs is indicative: we were able to replace them, which means we can replace anything in the IT sphere.
Even if tomorrow, purely hypothetically, we stop supporting iOS and Android, Russian developers will present an analogue. The conflict with the West has been going on for several years. The masks have been dropped, and it is clear that the enemy can use any instruments of pressure to achieve its goals.
But no matter what sanctions are introduced further, it is impossible to deprive Russia of technological sovereignty in the IT sphere, by all indications. Our IT specialists are ready to create and develop effective domestic technologies to replace Western ones.
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