Russia was not ready for the data center war it started with Ukraine

Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian digital infrastructure have exposed a major strategic weakness in its own IT and cloud model: highly centralized data centers and services create a single point of failure when physical infrastructure is targeted. For CIOs and technology leaders, the key lesson is that resilience now depends on geographic dispersion, backup architectures, and the ability to fail over critical services quickly—especially for payments, customer-facing apps, and core data platforms. Organizations operating in politically or physically contested environments should assume digital services are part of modern conflict and plan accordingly.