ICL Services' project to migrate the government agencies of Tatartstan to the domestic Astra Linux OS becomes the Project of the Year 2024

The project was commissioned by the Center for Digital Transformation of the Republic of Tatarstan, which plans to promptly replace the familiar Windows OS with a high-quality counterpart developed in Russia. The solution was offered by ICL Services and Astra Group, its strategic partner, which implemented the transfer of the client's facilities to Astra Linux Special Edition, the vendor's certified operating system for stable and secure operation in a short time.

As part of the project, ICL Services experts not only implemented the migration but also arranged training sessions. This helped civil servants to adapt to a system that was new to them.

"The project in our republic became one of the largest Astra Linux implementation projects in Russia, which allowed ICL Services to form its own comprehensive approach to such large-scale migrations and confidently scale it to other regions. It was a great challenge to translate and adapt more than a hundred thousand specialists in 82 state and municipal facilities of the republic, and we did it," admits Azat Fakhrutdinov, Project Manager of ICL Services.

"The migration was from Windows, which had been in use for many years, and our contractor was up to the task and successfully accomplished it. I believe that the key factors of our joint success were the synergy of administrative resources and management involvement, the good work of the region's digital team, and the high level of competence and involvement of ICL Services," says Aleksei Edelskov, Director of the Center for Digital Transformation of Tatarstan.

"Transfer of all workstations in the state authorities of the Republic of Tatarstan to the Astra Linux Russian operating system is a good example of successful migration and application of the domestic IT product offered by Astra Group. It will be especially important for those regions of the Russian Federation that have not yet decided to make a full transition to Russian technologies, or are thinking about the choice of quality developments, services, and partners with whom such transitions can be made. We really have accumulated considerable experience in qualitative import substitution of IT technologies both in the public sector and in large Russian companies," admits Andrei Soldatov, Director of the Regional Development Department of Astra Group.

Project of the Year is an annual IT profile competition created by the Global CIO digital transformation leadership community. In 2024, the contest was organized for the 14th time: its goal was to demonstrate the best results and expertise of leading Russian IT companies using real case studies. Voting for the best projects was traditionally held in an open format, where only IT directors (CIOs, CDTOs, etc.) of the Russian government and commercial organizations could cast their votes.