The software company announced its withdrawal from Russia at the end of March.
Shortly before the termination of the cloud business in Russia, the software company SAP offered its customers to move their cloud data from the Russian data center free of charge. A corresponding letter to the customers is dated March 23, followed by the announcement on March 24 to discontinue the SAP cloud business in Russia.
The news portal “The Kyiv Independent” had published the letter of March 23 on Tuesday and accused SAP of hypocrisy in a report. A spokesman for the group from Walldorf (Rhine-Neckar district) confirmed the authenticity of the letter on Wednesday. Previously, the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” had reported about it.
“We stand by our commitment to Ukraine by fully implementing all international sanctions, stopping sales and suspending cloud operations in Russia and Belarus,” the spokesman said. However, the data in the data centers did not belong to SAP, but to the customers.
“For legal reasons, we have therefore developed options as to how we can pass on this data,” said the spokesman. This also applies to international customers who have also been active on the Russian market. The data of Russian customers could thus be stored outside of Russia, but could not be used operationally, since data centers in the country are necessary for this. In the letter, SAP had also offered to provide customers with a copy of the data or to delete it.
