Ukraine’s Digital Fortress: How technological resilience helped preserve the state during the war
Today, a state’s resilience is measured not only by the strength of its army or its diplomatic weight on the international stage. In the era of hybrid conflicts, when cyberattacks and physical strikes pose a real threat, the ability of state institutions to keep functioning becomes critically important. Ukraine’s experience since February 24, 2022, clearly demonstrates how technological openness and diversified digital infrastructure became the foundation for keeping government services, the financial system, and key sectors of the economy operational even under full-scale war conditions.
At the start of the invasion, Ukraine’s digital systems came under unprecedented pressure. Physical attacks on energy and telecommunications infrastructure, as well as cyber threats, created a real danger for data centers. Even power and communications outages, not to mention the risk of complete infrastructure destruction, threatened millions of Ukrainians’ access to finances, state registers, documents, and other vital services.
However, despite the aggressive assault, Ukraine managed to preserve the operation of key digital components. One of the decisive factors was the state’s flexibility, which quickly adapted to the new reality by allowing part of state information resources to be hosted outside the country while continuing to use existing Ukrainian data centers. This strategy, based on the principle of geographic diversification, made it possible to minimize the impact of potential physical destruction.
From physical threat to strategic migration to the cloud
At the initial stage of the full-scale war, the main challenge was ensuring uninterrupted access to information, which is the basis of the state’s functioning. Vitalii Balashov, Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation for Cybersecurity and Cloud Technologies, emphasizes: “The biggest risk in the first days of the full-scale invasion was not so much the cyber threat as the physical destruction or capture of the infrastructure that physically held state data — the data centers and server rooms of public authorities.”
This concerned the preservation of such critically important databases as population, land, and real estate registers, as well as tax and education databases. This information is indispensable for issuing documents, calculating social payments, and confirming property rights. The threat was entirely real, because at the very beginning of the invasion Russia struck one of Ukraine’s government data centers with a cruise missile. As Balashov notes, “If the decision on cloud migration had been made a few weeks later, the consequences for the state could have been much more severe.”
The legal basis for such a step was created almost on the eve of the invasion. On February 17, 2022, a week before the start of the war, the Verkhovna Rada adopted a law that allowed state bodies to use cloud technologies. Although work on this document had been ongoing for years and was not directly related to preparations for aggression, this legislative change became, in effect, a life-saving tool for protecting state information.
The implementation of this decision then took on an emergency character. Already in early March 2022, the government issued an order allowing state bodies to place information and communication systems, electronic registers, and their backups in cloud resources and data centers outside Ukraine. In the first weeks of the war, more than 60 critical registers and systems from 36 Ukrainian government bodies were successfully migrated to the cloud resources of international providers. Among them were systems of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Health, the ProZorro electronic public procurement system, and the educational platform “All-Ukrainian School Online.” Later, it was reported that around 100 state registers and databases had been migrated.
It is important to note that this was a temporary solution. At the end of 2022, the government determined the procedures for operating state data on cloud resources outside Ukraine during martial law. Technical implementation at this scale required unprecedented speed. “The technical implementation happened literally in the first days and weeks: the Ministry of Digital Transformation team, together with international partners — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google — deployed a solution for the emergency migration of state registers to the cloud,” Balashov says. He also recalled how one provider delivered equipment for offline data transfer via Dublin and Poland as early as the beginning of March 2022. At the same time, part of the data was physically located in Poland, and negotiations were also held with Estonia and France. “Speed was a matter of survival for state services,” he concluded.
PrivatBank: transforming infrastructure in wartime
At the beginning of the full-scale war, the infrastructure of PrivatBank, one of the country’s largest financial institutions, was also under threat. Millions of clients depend on its stable operation for daily access to their funds and the ability to make payment transactions.
Before February 24, 2022, PrivatBank had two physical data centers located in different regions of Ukraine, provided redundancy for critical systems, and carried out annual failover testing by deliberately shutting down the data centers. However, full-scale war proved that under missile attacks, geographic distance between sites is not enough.
On March 8, 2022, the National Bank of Ukraine granted banks permission to use full cloud services and data centers outside Ukraine, including for migrating IT systems, databases, and card processing. This gave PrivatBank the opportunity to move part of its critical infrastructure beyond the immediate physical risk zone.
After that, the bank began a large-scale migration carried out without interrupting operations. The scale and timing of this operation were unprecedented. “We completed the main part of the migration in 45 days — about seven weeks. Around 500 specialists were involved in the project from an overall IT team of approximately 2,500 people. For the first wave, we identified about 330 critical systems that directly determined daily customer service,” PrivatBank’s press service reported.
First, systems for Privat24, cards, authorization, ATMs and POS terminals, as well as contact centers, were migrated. At the same time, the bank team was actively rebuilding integrations with the international payment systems Visa, Mastercard, and SWIFT. Throughout this period, the bank continued to serve its customers around the clock.
For the bank, this experience radically changed its understanding of resilience. Redundancy must now account not only for the failure of individual equipment or a single site, but also for the risk of large-scale physical impact on the entire infrastructure within the country. “Resilience is not one data center, one technology, or one cloud. It is the ability of a company to preserve its core function even when a large part of the usual working conditions no longer exist. For a bank, that function is the ability of millions of people to access their money and make a payment at any moment,” PrivatBank said.
Digital resilience in the energy supply system
The issue of the physical vulnerability of digital infrastructure became especially acute in the energy sector, which has been under systematic Russian attack for five years in a row. A strike on a substation or thermal power plant poses a risk not only to electricity supply but also to digital systems for dispatching, network monitoring, and accounting. When these systems become unavailable, the dispatcher loses key information about the state of the network, and repair crews lose access to the necessary data.
That is why the geographic distribution of digital infrastructure in this sector works on the same principle as in banking. If part of the systems is accessible from a backup site, damage to a specific facility does not necessarily lead to a loss of control over the entire system.
As Vitalii Balashov explains, digital resilience depends on a comprehensive combination of several layers of protection: physical protection of facilities, backup power supply, redundant communication channels, and backup sites. “Cloud solutions are one of the tools for increasing resilience, not its main pillar: when a specific data center or critical infrastructure facility that powers our systems — for example, a thermal power plant — comes under attack, it is the availability of backup sites and duplicated channels that allows state registers, Diia, and other services to keep working,” he said.
Between digital sovereignty and forced diversification
The war forced Ukrainian companies and the state to fundamentally rethink approaches to the geographic diversification of digital infrastructure. This, in turn, raised a new and equally important question: when will Ukraine be ready to return critical resources under its own jurisdiction, and what kind of system should ensure their security? This is not only about physically bringing data back, but also about creating strong Ukrainian infrastructure and stimulating a competitive market that meets the highest international security standards and uses the best global practices.
Examples such as GigaCloud and the Parkovy data center show how diversification is gradually developing in practice. Even before the full-scale invasion, they had business continuity plans and opened a site in Lviv. After the war began, demand for such solutions increased sharply. In 2022, about 60% of GigaCloud’s clients reserved or fully moved their infrastructure to backup sites in the EU and western Ukraine. The company also expanded its public cloud cluster in Warsaw twice.
However, this does not mean automatically moving all resources outside Ukraine. For providers, the distinction between the physical location of infrastructure and real control over information has become increasingly important. “Digital sovereignty is primarily about control over data and infrastructure, not about where the hardware is physically located. If we talk about our cloud S3 storage, the client decides where exactly their data will be stored: in Ukraine, Poland, or both countries at the same time, and can change that location at any moment. Using foreign infrastructure does not automatically mean transferring control over the data to a foreign company,” GigaCloud representatives explain.
The company classifies information according to its level of criticality. In their view, defense resources, state registers, information about critical infrastructure facilities, as well as citizens’ medical, personal, and financial data, must remain under Ukrainian jurisdiction. For operating systems, backups, and non-critical services, by contrast, geographic diversification can significantly improve resilience. “For critical systems, the optimal solution is most often a combination of two locations: the main infrastructure in Ukraine and the backup one in the EU,” the company clarifies.
Temporary solutions introduced in response to the physical threats of war are gradually turning into a long-term approach — not only for business, but also for the state. However, the rules introduced for the period of martial law still do not have clear transition mechanisms. That is why it is extremely important for Ukraine to define a model for working with state data after the active phase of the war ends, taking into account that war-related risks will remain relevant for a long time, and the need to protect and control critically important information will not disappear.
The cloud as a driver of production progress
If in 2022 cloud infrastructure was viewed primarily as a tool for preserving critical services, today it is becoming the foundation for new, innovative production models. Technology sectors increasingly depend on the ability to collect, store, and instantly process vast amounts of information, as well as effectively use artificial intelligence.
The agricultural sector is a vivid example of this trend. Modern technologies allow drones to collect detailed information from fields, cloud platforms turn it into valuable analytics, and artificial intelligence algorithms help detect plant problems and optimize resource use.
According to Valerii Yarovenko, co-founder of DroneUA, after 2022, labor shortages, complicated logistics, unstable energy supply, and work near the front line made technology an integral part of everyday production processes. Drones collect data on field conditions, which is then uploaded to a cloud platform. There, maps of problem areas are created, and computer vision algorithms help detect plant stress and weeds. The final decision, of course, remains with the agronomist. However, large volumes of data cannot always be transmitted online from the field. “Drones generate such a large amount of data that simply uploading it to the cloud from the field is impossible. There is an entire logistics process of transferring data on hard drives to regional offices, from where it is uploaded to cloud services,” DroneUA says.
Because of restrictions on drone flights, satellites now provide a significant share of geospatial information. This greatly simplifies logistics, although satellite imagery is generally less detailed than drone footage of a specific field.
The next level is artificial intelligence, but its effectiveness depends not only on computing resources, but also on how well the information the system works with is organized. “Artificial intelligence increases the requirements not only for computing power, but also for data organization quality. You cannot simply add AI to a chaotic set of tables, photos, and incompatible systems and expect an industrial result. It needs structured historical data, clear access rules, fast transmission channels, and reliable redundancy,” Yarovenko notes.
Thus, for the agricultural sector, access to cloud infrastructure, satellite information, and computing resources has a direct economic effect. It determines how quickly a farm can detect a problem, adjust field operations, and use resources efficiently where they are truly needed.
From wartime resilience to technological development
The full-scale war forced Ukraine to fundamentally rebuild its digital infrastructure. This included data redundancy, migration of critical systems, and integration of Ukrainian and international resources. Initially, this was vital for ensuring the uninterrupted operation of the state, the banking sector, energy, and other key areas. Today, however, a resilient digital infrastructure is becoming a reliable foundation for the development of artificial intelligence, automation, and progress in technology sectors — from agriculture to defense technology.
However, solutions born in an emergency cannot remain that way forever. The next strategic task for Ukraine is to transform the model of digital resilience formed during the war into a stable and effective development mechanism in the postwar period.
This involves scaling up its own digital infrastructure and building a strong competitive cloud services market. Such a market must meet high security requirements, actively draw on international experience, and create conditions for competition with the best global solutions.
Roman Spas is the author of a blog about website development, IT news, web project promotion, design and modern technologies. In his materials, he explains complex digital topics in simple language, shares practical advice for website owners, entrepreneurs, marketers and specialists who want to better understand the online environment. The author's main focus is on effective websites, SEO, web design, internet marketing and technological solutions that help businesses develop in the digital space.
Ukraine’s Digital Fortress: How technological resilience helped preserve the state during the war
Today, a state’s resilience is measured not only by the strength of its army or its diplomatic weight on the international stage. In the era of hybrid conflicts, when cyberattacks and physical strikes pose a real threat, the ability of state institutions to keep functioning becomes critically important. Ukraine’s experience since February 24, 2022, clearly demonstrates how technological openness and diversified digital infrastructure became the foundation for keeping government services, the financial system, and key sectors of the economy operational even under full-scale war conditions.
At the start of the invasion, Ukraine’s digital systems came under unprecedented pressure. Physical attacks on energy and telecommunications infrastructure, as well as cyber threats, created a real danger for data centers. Even power and communications outages, not to mention the risk of complete infrastructure destruction, threatened millions of Ukrainians’ access to finances, state registers, documents, and other vital services.
However, despite the aggressive assault, Ukraine managed to preserve the operation of key digital components. One of the decisive factors was the state’s flexibility, which quickly adapted to the new reality by allowing part of state information resources to be hosted outside the country while continuing to use existing Ukrainian data centers. This strategy, based on the principle of geographic diversification, made it possible to minimize the impact of potential physical destruction.
From physical threat to strategic migration to the cloud
At the initial stage of the full-scale war, the main challenge was ensuring uninterrupted access to information, which is the basis of the state’s functioning. Vitalii Balashov, Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation for Cybersecurity and Cloud Technologies, emphasizes: “The biggest risk in the first days of the full-scale invasion was not so much the cyber threat as the physical destruction or capture of the infrastructure that physically held state data — the data centers and server rooms of public authorities.”
This concerned the preservation of such critically important databases as population, land, and real estate registers, as well as tax and education databases. This information is indispensable for issuing documents, calculating social payments, and confirming property rights. The threat was entirely real, because at the very beginning of the invasion Russia struck one of Ukraine’s government data centers with a cruise missile. As Balashov notes, “If the decision on cloud migration had been made a few weeks later, the consequences for the state could have been much more severe.”
The legal basis for such a step was created almost on the eve of the invasion. On February 17, 2022, a week before the start of the war, the Verkhovna Rada adopted a law that allowed state bodies to use cloud technologies. Although work on this document had been ongoing for years and was not directly related to preparations for aggression, this legislative change became, in effect, a life-saving tool for protecting state information.
The implementation of this decision then took on an emergency character. Already in early March 2022, the government issued an order allowing state bodies to place information and communication systems, electronic registers, and their backups in cloud resources and data centers outside Ukraine. In the first weeks of the war, more than 60 critical registers and systems from 36 Ukrainian government bodies were successfully migrated to the cloud resources of international providers. Among them were systems of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Health, the ProZorro electronic public procurement system, and the educational platform “All-Ukrainian School Online.” Later, it was reported that around 100 state registers and databases had been migrated.
It is important to note that this was a temporary solution. At the end of 2022, the government determined the procedures for operating state data on cloud resources outside Ukraine during martial law. Technical implementation at this scale required unprecedented speed. “The technical implementation happened literally in the first days and weeks: the Ministry of Digital Transformation team, together with international partners — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google — deployed a solution for the emergency migration of state registers to the cloud,” Balashov says. He also recalled how one provider delivered equipment for offline data transfer via Dublin and Poland as early as the beginning of March 2022. At the same time, part of the data was physically located in Poland, and negotiations were also held with Estonia and France. “Speed was a matter of survival for state services,” he concluded.
PrivatBank: transforming infrastructure in wartime
At the beginning of the full-scale war, the infrastructure of PrivatBank, one of the country’s largest financial institutions, was also under threat. Millions of clients depend on its stable operation for daily access to their funds and the ability to make payment transactions.
Before February 24, 2022, PrivatBank had two physical data centers located in different regions of Ukraine, provided redundancy for critical systems, and carried out annual failover testing by deliberately shutting down the data centers. However, full-scale war proved that under missile attacks, geographic distance between sites is not enough.
On March 8, 2022, the National Bank of Ukraine granted banks permission to use full cloud services and data centers outside Ukraine, including for migrating IT systems, databases, and card processing. This gave PrivatBank the opportunity to move part of its critical infrastructure beyond the immediate physical risk zone.
After that, the bank began a large-scale migration carried out without interrupting operations. The scale and timing of this operation were unprecedented. “We completed the main part of the migration in 45 days — about seven weeks. Around 500 specialists were involved in the project from an overall IT team of approximately 2,500 people. For the first wave, we identified about 330 critical systems that directly determined daily customer service,” PrivatBank’s press service reported.
First, systems for Privat24, cards, authorization, ATMs and POS terminals, as well as contact centers, were migrated. At the same time, the bank team was actively rebuilding integrations with the international payment systems Visa, Mastercard, and SWIFT. Throughout this period, the bank continued to serve its customers around the clock.
For the bank, this experience radically changed its understanding of resilience. Redundancy must now account not only for the failure of individual equipment or a single site, but also for the risk of large-scale physical impact on the entire infrastructure within the country. “Resilience is not one data center, one technology, or one cloud. It is the ability of a company to preserve its core function even when a large part of the usual working conditions no longer exist. For a bank, that function is the ability of millions of people to access their money and make a payment at any moment,” PrivatBank said.
Digital resilience in the energy supply system
The issue of the physical vulnerability of digital infrastructure became especially acute in the energy sector, which has been under systematic Russian attack for five years in a row. A strike on a substation or thermal power plant poses a risk not only to electricity supply but also to digital systems for dispatching, network monitoring, and accounting. When these systems become unavailable, the dispatcher loses key information about the state of the network, and repair crews lose access to the necessary data.
That is why the geographic distribution of digital infrastructure in this sector works on the same principle as in banking. If part of the systems is accessible from a backup site, damage to a specific facility does not necessarily lead to a loss of control over the entire system.
As Vitalii Balashov explains, digital resilience depends on a comprehensive combination of several layers of protection: physical protection of facilities, backup power supply, redundant communication channels, and backup sites. “Cloud solutions are one of the tools for increasing resilience, not its main pillar: when a specific data center or critical infrastructure facility that powers our systems — for example, a thermal power plant — comes under attack, it is the availability of backup sites and duplicated channels that allows state registers, Diia, and other services to keep working,” he said.
Between digital sovereignty and forced diversification
The war forced Ukrainian companies and the state to fundamentally rethink approaches to the geographic diversification of digital infrastructure. This, in turn, raised a new and equally important question: when will Ukraine be ready to return critical resources under its own jurisdiction, and what kind of system should ensure their security? This is not only about physically bringing data back, but also about creating strong Ukrainian infrastructure and stimulating a competitive market that meets the highest international security standards and uses the best global practices.
Examples such as GigaCloud and the Parkovy data center show how diversification is gradually developing in practice. Even before the full-scale invasion, they had business continuity plans and opened a site in Lviv. After the war began, demand for such solutions increased sharply. In 2022, about 60% of GigaCloud’s clients reserved or fully moved their infrastructure to backup sites in the EU and western Ukraine. The company also expanded its public cloud cluster in Warsaw twice.
However, this does not mean automatically moving all resources outside Ukraine. For providers, the distinction between the physical location of infrastructure and real control over information has become increasingly important. “Digital sovereignty is primarily about control over data and infrastructure, not about where the hardware is physically located. If we talk about our cloud S3 storage, the client decides where exactly their data will be stored: in Ukraine, Poland, or both countries at the same time, and can change that location at any moment. Using foreign infrastructure does not automatically mean transferring control over the data to a foreign company,” GigaCloud representatives explain.
The company classifies information according to its level of criticality. In their view, defense resources, state registers, information about critical infrastructure facilities, as well as citizens’ medical, personal, and financial data, must remain under Ukrainian jurisdiction. For operating systems, backups, and non-critical services, by contrast, geographic diversification can significantly improve resilience. “For critical systems, the optimal solution is most often a combination of two locations: the main infrastructure in Ukraine and the backup one in the EU,” the company clarifies.
Temporary solutions introduced in response to the physical threats of war are gradually turning into a long-term approach — not only for business, but also for the state. However, the rules introduced for the period of martial law still do not have clear transition mechanisms. That is why it is extremely important for Ukraine to define a model for working with state data after the active phase of the war ends, taking into account that war-related risks will remain relevant for a long time, and the need to protect and control critically important information will not disappear.
The cloud as a driver of production progress
If in 2022 cloud infrastructure was viewed primarily as a tool for preserving critical services, today it is becoming the foundation for new, innovative production models. Technology sectors increasingly depend on the ability to collect, store, and instantly process vast amounts of information, as well as effectively use artificial intelligence.
The agricultural sector is a vivid example of this trend. Modern technologies allow drones to collect detailed information from fields, cloud platforms turn it into valuable analytics, and artificial intelligence algorithms help detect plant problems and optimize resource use.
According to Valerii Yarovenko, co-founder of DroneUA, after 2022, labor shortages, complicated logistics, unstable energy supply, and work near the front line made technology an integral part of everyday production processes. Drones collect data on field conditions, which is then uploaded to a cloud platform. There, maps of problem areas are created, and computer vision algorithms help detect plant stress and weeds. The final decision, of course, remains with the agronomist. However, large volumes of data cannot always be transmitted online from the field. “Drones generate such a large amount of data that simply uploading it to the cloud from the field is impossible. There is an entire logistics process of transferring data on hard drives to regional offices, from where it is uploaded to cloud services,” DroneUA says.
Because of restrictions on drone flights, satellites now provide a significant share of geospatial information. This greatly simplifies logistics, although satellite imagery is generally less detailed than drone footage of a specific field.
The next level is artificial intelligence, but its effectiveness depends not only on computing resources, but also on how well the information the system works with is organized. “Artificial intelligence increases the requirements not only for computing power, but also for data organization quality. You cannot simply add AI to a chaotic set of tables, photos, and incompatible systems and expect an industrial result. It needs structured historical data, clear access rules, fast transmission channels, and reliable redundancy,” Yarovenko notes.
Thus, for the agricultural sector, access to cloud infrastructure, satellite information, and computing resources has a direct economic effect. It determines how quickly a farm can detect a problem, adjust field operations, and use resources efficiently where they are truly needed.
From wartime resilience to technological development
The full-scale war forced Ukraine to fundamentally rebuild its digital infrastructure. This included data redundancy, migration of critical systems, and integration of Ukrainian and international resources. Initially, this was vital for ensuring the uninterrupted operation of the state, the banking sector, energy, and other key areas. Today, however, a resilient digital infrastructure is becoming a reliable foundation for the development of artificial intelligence, automation, and progress in technology sectors — from agriculture to defense technology.
However, solutions born in an emergency cannot remain that way forever. The next strategic task for Ukraine is to transform the model of digital resilience formed during the war into a stable and effective development mechanism in the postwar period.
This involves scaling up its own digital infrastructure and building a strong competitive cloud services market. Such a market must meet high security requirements, actively draw on international experience, and create conditions for competition with the best global solutions.
Roman Spas
Roman Spas is the author of a blog about website development, IT news, web project promotion, design and modern technologies. In his materials, he explains complex digital topics in simple language, shares practical advice for website owners, entrepreneurs, marketers and specialists who want to better understand the online environment. The author's main focus is on effective websites, SEO, web design, internet marketing and technological solutions that help businesses develop in the digital space.
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