How the Consumption of Cloud Services Has Changed. GigaCloud Report 2022
“2022 will be a year of interesting and groundbreaking projects, cool experiments with our clients and partners. Courage, freedom and the cloud are what businesses need today. And GigaCloud can give everything!”, that’s how we saw 2022 in the previous year’s report. Although this year changed all the plans and all of us, that is how we will remember it.
Every Ukrainian business faces new challenges every day — those related to security, operation, and resources. Despite everything, every company strives to grow, fulfil its obligations to customers and enter new markets. Under such circumstances, we tried to quickly respond to changes so that each of our clients and partners was confident in the reliability and security of our infrastructure. After all, our Mission has become more relevant than ever: “We create cloud space to increase your level of freedom”.
In our second public report, we share with you the results of GigaCloud in 2022, tell how the consumption of cloud services has changed among companies of various industries and countries, and how we are transforming into an international company.
Increasing growth rate
Every year more and more companies opt for our infrastructure. In 2022, we built private clouds for 14 large projects. This is exactly as much as was built by the company for the entire time until 2022. During this year, 437 companies chose our public cloud, which is 45% more projects than in 2021. However, there were negative trends as well: when the war started, 10% of our customers closed or suspended their businesses.
According to the results of 2022, GigaCloud occupies 16.3% of the Ukrainian cloud market. Networks & Business magazine reported that in 2022, the cloud market of Ukraine grew by 22.8% and reached $46.2 million. In 2022, GigaCloud grew faster than the market: there was an increase of 75% in UAH and more than 25% in foreign currency.
We invest all the funds earned in expanding our technical sites. In total, in 2022, we invested $3 million in the renewal of hardware, the expansion of our product portfolio and clusters in Ukraine and Europe.
Businesses are increasingly using the cloud for heavy workloads and critical services
Large enterprises use services more actively and transfer a significant part of IT solutions to the cloud. The time to decide on migration to the cloud has reduced considerably. Also, after getting to know the cloud in practice, customers continue to increase the number of projects they develop in the cloud environment.
We observe the trend of using more and more resources and scaling private clouds. The total amount of data stored in private clouds has increased by 35%, and the amount of RAM used increased by 65%.
The average check of public cloud customers increased by only 3%. But this does not mean that small and medium-sized businesses have not begun to consume cloud services more. The reason is the migration to the private cloud of customers who have “outgrown” the public cloud, as well as the large share of new projects that started using the cloud for the first time since the beginning of the war and ordered minimal resources for that.
The Cloud First strategy started working in the government sector
In 2022, the government’s Cloud First strategy was finally launched. This was facilitated by the Law “On Cloud Services” signed by the President which came into force in September.
During 2022, we obtained 55% more government customers in our cloud than a year earlier. Just like private businesses, the public sector is rapidly scaling while entrusting the most critical services to the cloud. For the first time, the government sector share in our proceeds exceeded 10% and increased to 20%.
According to our predictions, this direction will grow rapidly in the coming years. Having experienced the possibilities and advantages of working in the cloud, hundreds of government customers will no longer want to return to their own servers.
Data is migrating west
Before the war, the majority of clients opted for placement in Kyiv clusters, but since 24 February, the situation has changed dramatically. 60% of customers have reserved or completely transferred their infrastructure to our sites in Europe and the West of Ukraine. During the first half of the year, the Lviv site grew the most: the increase was 1,500 virtual machines and more than 3.6 PB of client data.
The trend of data migration abroad continued throughout the year and reached its peak in the last quarter. To meet the demand, we expanded the public cloud cluster in Warsaw twice, and also built a new one. In autumn, we built four private clouds on a Polish site. And the number of servers involved in it has increased by 138% in the last three months alone.
The European market and the first major project with Polish business in Ukraine
We are proud that a Ukrainian company with Polish roots chooses GigaCloud. In 2022, we implemented the first major project with PZU Ukraine non-banking financial group.
It is among the TOP-10 insurance companies in Ukraine and serves more than 6 million clients. This company is a subsidiary of Powszechny Zakład Ubezpieczeń Spółka Akcyjna (PZU SA, Poland), one of the largest insurance companies in the Eastern European region, which has been assigned a financial reliability rating of “A-” by the international rating agency Standard & Poor’s.
At the open tender, GigaCloud outperformed both the “big three” operators and Polish providers.
Last year, we started our transformation into an international company. We are planning to open six more GigaCloud offices in the largest EU countries within five years. In connection with this, we again began to actively hire people — in the second half of 2022, 30 new professionals joined our team.
Increasing the security level of services
In 2022, we were granted the VMware’s highest partner status ― Principal Partner. It confirms our expertise in using the vendor’s products and guarantees GigaCloud customers enjoy high-quality services.
We also confirmed the compliance of our cloud with the PCI DSS information security standard developed by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council. This certification allows us to host data from banks, fintech companies, etc. in our cloud.
In the spring, we successfully passed ISO/IEC 27701:2019 certification. It proves that GigaCloud has reliable personal data management processes in Ukraine and Poland, as well as confirms its compliance with GDPR requirements.
During the year, we faced numerous attacks. The information security system built and a strong team helped us prevent incidents. In 2022, we implemented PAM (Privileged Access Management) — a system for managing access for privileged users and monitoring them. The solution makes our clouds even more secure. We have also introduced and are constantly adjusting SIEM. This allows us to collect all security events, diagnose bottlenecks, and respond to incidents in a timely manner.
The number of partner companies has increased
In 2022, the GigaCloud partner program was joined by 50 new partners who had already managed to conclude one or more agreements. Together with our partners, we implemented 238 projects during the year. This is 79% more than in 2021 and 303% more than in 2020.
TOP-3 projects of the year
- Evacuation of Prozorro data to the Lviv site in the midst of hostilities
Prozorro is a critical system of public procurement for the country. In 2018, the company built its IT infrastructure on the basis of the clouds of two operators. It rented a private cloud from us, located in a data centre in Kyiv. Taking into account the risks associated with the possible outbreak of hostilities, the company asked to transport the private cloud equipment to our Lviv site. Our experts did it in two stages to keep the system running. Due to the coherence and consistency of the actions of all team members and the fact that the system was organised from the beginning with regard to best practices, the transportation took place without force majeure and in a short time. On 26 February, the equipment was already in Lviv, and since 27 February it was fully operational.
- A fault-tolerant private solution for EasyPay
The EasyPay business is downtime critical. With the beginning of the war, the company realised that in the event of force majeure, the backups themselves would not be enough to restore critical data and services. GigaCloud team built a completely isolated private cloud and customized it to the client’s needs. Current backup copies of the site, apps, services, and databases are stored there. The main data and services are hosted on servers in the customer’s data centre. Ground and cloud data centres are constantly synchronized with each other. This allows us to distribute productive components between them and increase the fault tolerance of the IT infrastructure.
- Reliable IT infrastructure for Learning & Technology educational platform
Lionwood.Software, which developed Learning & Technology platform, had three tasks: ensure fault-tolerant operation of the platform, quickly scale it and securely store the users’ personal data. As part of the project, our specialists built two solutions: public cloud on OpenStack and public cloud infrastructure on VMware with comprehensive information protection system (CIPS). Learning & Technology platform is a highly loaded system with a microservice architecture. The Kubernetes service built into the cloud on OpenStack allows managing the work of microservices and distributes the load between them. And the cloud with CIPS makes it possible to protect the personal data of platform users according to the requirements of Ukrainian legislation. Thanks to this technological platform, Ukrainian schoolchildren have the opportunity to study even from abroad and from the occupied territories. After all, despite the war, children should get a quality education. We are proud to have joined this really important project.
“At the end of 2020, we published a manifesto with our Mission: ‘We create cloud space to increase your level of freedom’. A good cognac needs at least five years of ageing, and our Mission, in the literal sense, passed the battle testing in two,” says Artem Kokhanevych, СEO of GigaCloud International. “In 2022, we finally realised that our expertise and tedious work made it possible for us to become an infrastructure partner for hundreds of companies seeking to grow. We have built a system business in Ukraine, so it’s time to move on. Access to the EU is the result of our successful work. After all, we were right — courage, freedom and the cloud are what businesses need today. And GigaCloud can give everything!”
