VTB will transfer all employees to the Russian Astra Linux by the end of the year

2024: Plan to move all employees to Astra Linux before the end of the year

VTB Bank, as part of achieving technological sovereignty and migration from foreign software solutions to domestic developments, expects to transfer all its employees to the Russian operating system Astra Linux by the end of 2024. This was announced on February 27, 2024 to TAdviser by representatives of VTB.

source = VTB Bank Official Telegram Channel

"VTB acquired perpetual licenses of the Astra Linux operating system from Astra Group of Companies as part of a strategic partnership concluded by the bank and the IT Group in June 2023. We expect that by the end of 2024 all employees will be able to fully use the Russian operating system, "Sergei Bezbogov, deputy head of the technological unit - senior vice president of VTB, shared the bank's plans.

As Sergey Bezbogov said in his speech at TAdviser SummIT in May 2023, a special program was launched in order to implement import substitution in the bank, which provides for work on four main clusters: system software, virtualization, databases, office software. At the end of 2022, more than 20 thousand implementations related to import substitution took place at the bank. At the same time, many of the approved import substitution indicators were achieved ahead of schedule. In particular, the indicator for Servers OS in 2022 amounted to 16.5% (against the 15% indicator approved in the strategy). 3400 servers were transferred to the Russian Astra Linux in the bank.

"The implementation of the operating system is based on the results of pilot testing, which continued throughout 2023. The first 3.5 thousand employees of various divisions of the bank already use Astra Linux as the main operating system. At the same time, at the workplaces of more than 30 thousand employees, preliminary work was carried out to install the Russian operating system, "added VTB Senior Vice President.

Astra Linux Special Edition is a certified OS with built-in information protection tools for stable and secure IT infrastructures of any scale and uninterrupted processing of information of various degrees of confidentiality.

According to Astra Group of Companies, the system meets all safety requirements adopted in the Russian Federation for use in executive authorities, state-owned companies, state corporations, industrial enterprises, energy and oil and gas sectors, at critical information infrastructure (CII) facilities, in the banking sector, health care and education systems .

The main security mechanisms of Astra Linux Special Edition are a closed-loop software environment, mandatory integrity control and access control, guaranteed erasure of deleted data.

The reliability of the implementation and use of the system in the bank will be ensured by the purchased extended technical support package for a period of 2 years, within the framework of which VTB will receive all the necessary updates and support services.

"This is a bank with a large-scale infrastructure, where many multi-vendor solutions are involved, which need to be interconnected and achieve uninterrupted operation on the new platform. Our main task is to ensure the correct and trouble-free functioning of the client's IT services, so we are making every effort to ensure that the infrastructure is fully prepared for migration, "said Ilya Sivtsev, General Director of Astra Group of Companies. "At the same time, the change of the OS always carries certain risks, and in order to minimize them and guarantee the continuity of the customer's business processes, we left the opportunity to work in two circuits as a backup option: both updated and previous."