On 20 March 2024, Microsoft began restricting access to its cloud services for Russian companies in accordance with the 12th package of sanctions adopted by the Council of the EU. Considering the situation, as a support eXpress provides Both on-premise licences and trial cloud SaaS are available to choose from. The offer is valid for all for new customers with licences up to 5000 users.
Import substitution of software in the Russian market has accelerated: the share of expenditures on Russian products from the total investments of companies and government agencies in IT in 2023 was 53%, while a year earlier — 45%. According to the analytical agency CNews, at the beginning of 2024 Depending on the industry, they managed to abandon 10–50% of foreign products. The process of import substitution is developing most actively at enterprises belonging to critical infrastructure and in the public sector. For example, in September 2024, the executive authorities of St. Petersburg received a letter from the Committee for Informatisation and Communications to ban the use of foreign messengers for official correspondence.
In order to prevent facts of compromise, destruction or modification of restricted information, as well as to prevent preconditions for such facts…I ask to exclude the use of foreign messengers (WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.) for the exchange of official information, - which was published by the St. Petersburg online edition «Fontantka»
- This measure has been taken to protect from compromise, destruction or modification the official correspondence and information exchanged between civil servants during their work.
As an alternative to public messengers, which process data in an external loop and often not even on Russian territory, the authorities have proposed using the corporate platform eXpress for working communication, cites the eXpress website as saying that it is "the only corporate Super App certified by Russia's FSTEC to date to level 4 confidence level with installations in large companies".
Let's list corporate communication solution from public messenger:
- Multifactor authentication. It guarantees the user secure access to corporate correspondence and internal corporate resources.
- Role-based access control model. The administrator can configure user rights and restrictions according to company group policies: forwarding to chat rooms or eXpress channels, sending files, saving to device memory, viewing data, etc.
- High privacy mode, where users cannot take a screenshot of the screen and all read chat messages are automatically deleted on a timer.
- Notifications about external users in chat. In addition, contacts who are not employees of the company can not start chatting, the first message is written by a corporate member of the chat room.
- Deletion of data from the user. The administrator of the corporate platform can set up automatic deletion of the session in which the employee who left the company worked, remotely clean the cache in the cryptocurrency container and deny him access to corporate information.
An important advantage of the eXpress system is that it is a completely Russian development, and deployed exclusively in the customers' infrastructure. Accordingly, none of the elements of the eXpress service (nor the service as a whole) can be disabled or blocked due to sanctions.
Russian federal publications took an interest in the topic and issued extended reviews of the corporate superapp eXpress. In particular, in the Fontanka piece, among the platform's features :
- three-factor authentication over independent channels;
- messages, calls, conferences and files are fully encrypted;
- communication takes place on trusted corporate servers.
Another review on Argumenty i Fakty details how eXpress Privacy Mode works, specifically several "restrictive features that further protect work information."
- There is an option to set up deletion of messages after sending or after reading them after a certain period of time, or to allow messages to be displayed only from the smartphone app. In addition, the application will send a notification if the user tries to take a screenshot of the correspondence or record the screen in this mode. You can also prevent the conversation partner from forwarding text or saving files uploaded to the conversation to your device or cloud storage.
The enterprise-level information security standards are also confirmed by eXpress customers. In particular, Nornickel, as an operator of a distributed network of critical infrastructure facilities, notes separately that "all elements of the platform are fully deployed in several data centres of the company and operate within a common security loop".
"Before the introduction of eXpress, it was not possible to ensure the required level of protection of production information when communicating in a mobile application. The service provides the required level of security," another eXpress customer, Russian Railways, writes on its official portal.
Rosatom has also found a reliable vendor in eXpress to create "convenient and secure mobile access to corporate systems". The company notes that "in Rosatom's internal digitalisation projects, we focus on ready-made domestic products that meet industry requirements and have a clear roadmap for development. Colleagues from eXpress have proven their competences and demonstrated their desire to develop the product during their joint work with the Greenatom project team, and we will continue our co-operation in the future". Igor Bederov, an expert of the National Technology Initiative (NTI), also singled out eXpress among Russian platforms with a high degree of protection in an article by RIA Novosti.
The ban on the use of public messengers at work has long been discussed at various levels. For example, after the detention of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France, even presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov spoke on the subject:
"Civil servants are not supposed to use messengers for official purposes. No messenger is reliable from the point of view of information security - and neither is Telegram... In the presidential administration, we do not use any messenger for official purposes," Interfax quoted him as saying.
The convenience of public communication platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Zoom, etc. has ensured their penetration into the business processes of government companies, ministries and agencies. The vast majority of employees use them in their work, entrusting them with important sensitive data due to negligence. However, it is important to understand that public platforms are unable to fulfil information protection requirements, lack elements of corporate administration, and use computing infrastructure located outside the Russian Federation. The trend of prohibiting the use of unprotected public communication platforms is relevant and is becoming common practice.
For comfortable workflow organisation on the Russian platform, eXpress offers new customers with up to 5,000 licenses to use the application free of charge for 3 months. The vendor provides installation in the cloud in 1 day or deploys on-premise in 2 weeks. After testing the usage, the customer can for further development of their own secure communication space. The developer provides technical support to users at all stages of testing and installation, as well as organises training on product features for administrators and implementation team.
