ILLUSTRATIVE IMAGE: Regis Duvignau / Reuters
Aeroflot, the flag carrier and largest airline of Russia, has said that it’s ready to use a reservation and sales system with servers inside Russia from 2022, Interfax says.
According to the report, Aeroflot will use a Russian company, which will be created by the American travel technology company Sabre Corporation. Currently, Sabre Corporation keeps Aeroflot booking data on servers in the US.
Under the Russian law, Aeroflot is obliged to store its data in Russia. So, the state-run company has started actions to comply with these demands.
Kirill Bogdanov, Deputy CEO for IT at Aeroflot stated that the aforementioned Russian company will be created in 2019. The data centers will be created in 2019-2020. In 2021, Aeroflot will start moving its data from servers in the US to Russia. In 2022, it will get a digital platform, which will reportedly be ready by January 1, 2018. The controlling stake of this platform will be in the hands of the Russian side.
However, till then, personal data and some flights info of Aeroflot will remain on the servers in the US. Thus, in some cases US special services can get access to this data via various mechanisms. It’s possible that this is one of the factors that could help to explain how data about movement of Russian citizens through Russia appear in variuos “open source” reports online.
This situation is one of the examples confirming that the US keeps a full digital dominance, including technical intelligence, over its geopolitical opponent.
It should be noted that Pobeda Airlines LLC, a low-cost airline and a wholly owned subsidiary of Aeroflot, also uses the US company to store booking data – Navitair. S7 and Ural Airlines cooperate with the Spanish company, Amadeus.
A counter-example is Chinese airline compaines. like Air China, use the Chinese state-owned enterprise TravelSky to store and proceed their data.
