MongoDB to terminate Russian SaaS accounts NoSQL database challenger MongoDB has decided it won't sell its wares in Russia – not even its software-as-a-service offering. News of the cancellation emerged from Oleg Brodt, chief innovation officer of Cyber@BGU at Israel's Ben Gurion university: MongoDB is terminating Russian accounts. Makes you wonder how your IT may …
He's also demanding the closing of Ukrainian skies, which even my 3 month old baby boy knows would mean WW3.
So while I feel for him and his country, he needs to be realistic about the support that can be provided rather than the support that would be liked.
The Ukraine gov know they don't have a cat's chance in hell of getting that no-fly zone, they're not daft, they just have to keep pleading to ensure they don't lose support they do need.
Zelensky is not an idiot, he knows how social media works and that people have the attention spans of goldfish post 2000, so he and his team have to keep up the demands, keep making a fuss to ensure we don't get bored and forget about them and let that Russian nutter win.
They say there's no such thing as bad PR, except in this situation. No company wants to be the one staying put in Vlad's pleasure park and then watch their share price drain away to nothing, so they're all making a stand in the hopes it will be all good PR. None of these companies want to volantarily pull out of a market with a 140m million people to sell to. Modern Russian's are like that lot on the telly in the 1970s, queuing 6 hours for a loaf and buying Levis and Elton John LPs on the black market, they are ( were? ) affluent, up on latest tech just like the rest of the world.
The western businesses through, they just know the other 7bn on the planet are worth more to them right now and don't need bad PR affecting that opportunity. So they're all playing the "We're united with Ukraine!" PR game while every single one is already planning how to milk Russia once the doors are open again.
Businesses aren't charities, they're for making money and morals get in the way but necessary to secure the hearts and minds of we suckers who buy the products!
The companies which terminated services won’t have Russians flocking back no matter how much the everyday Russian may support Ukraine. Common sense says this will be added to the corporate risk assessment if it’s business use and (even should Putin go) consumers will still seek out a homegrown equivalent to avoid a repeat.
Sony and Apple will be fine perhaps but Oracle and MongoDB won’t be.
But, what if Boris Johnson is deemed to be too much under the control of Putin, and people start placing sanctions on us?
My MongoDB instance runs on a server in my personal possession, so at least it will continue to work for as long as there is electricity to power it.
It is paired with an Nginx web server. The company behind that is owned by a Russian, so what happens there? Again my instances will continue to work regardless.
Whilst I fully agree with the principle of sanctions with Russia to bring things back under control, there is however a very interesting dimension coming out around risk, I bet nobody has got this on their risk register at the moment.
It will be interesting to see what unintended consequences might come out as people consider the wider implications of cloud.
They will simply steal the software they need. Actually they have been stealing SW and HW designs forever.
Also, Russia and Belarus has plenty of engineers who can build advanced designs in both SW and HW. Their home-designed computers are actually quite nice, no difference to ARM or Intel, running Linux. Not as fast as Intel, but good enough for many purposes.
What they lack is high end manufacturing and the Americans(and their vasalls such as Taiwan, Germany, Holland) have tightened the screws massively on this aspect.
Russia has maneuvered herself into a quagmire of military nature, very similar to Afghanistan. They should now negotiate for peace or face the similar issues as the USSR did. Cheap infantery weapons plus motivated fighters can bleed superpowers white.
Excellent decision.
I would really like to see MS, SAS, Salesforce and Oracle do the same.
Shutdown all access from Russia and see what happens when some of their industry just stops working.
I'd be prepared to use Windows Update to change all the admin credentials and then set the default language to Ukrainian.
We should be doing everything possible to undermine the Russian state and their industry.
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