Splunk pulls out of Russia

In a surprise move, multinational logging and big data analytics company Splunk has decided to sever all business ties with Russia.

The company's Sydney office provided a statement to iTnews via its PR agency that confirmed the pull-out from Russia, but which was otherwise light on detail.

"Splunk is continually evaluating where we invest and focus our resources globally.

As part of this ongoing evaluation, we have decided Splunk will no longer be selling software and services to organisations in Russia.

Our decisions are made to drive the greatest return on investment for the business and to ensure the ongoing success of our customers.”

While existing contracts with businesses in Russia will be honoured, Splunk will say no to new dealings with anyone within or outside the country, the company said.

*This includes opportunities with technical partners, resellers, distributors and vendors.

It also applies to business with subsidiaries based in countries outside of Russia whose parent company is in Russia, or who would use the software or services within the territory," Splunk said.

Over the last few years, Russia has regulated tech firms in the country and clamped down on the free movement of data, to the point that its government mandated an independent domain name system (DNS) service and restricted international data exchange points, so as to be able to isolate itself from the global internet.

Local and overseas companies operating in the Russian Federation are also required to provide remote access to their systems for government agencies.

The remote access requirement created a large security risk as the same leaked login credentials were reused across multiple organisations for years with security researchers finding these in thousands of open, unsecured data bases connected to the internet.