Information technology
At the end of 2023, the IT Division demonstrated growth in all areas of activity. Thus, free cash flow from the Division’s business activities doubled. Thus, the growth of free cash flow at current investments is achieved, among other things, due to proper capital management and operational efficiency. This demonstrates that the IT Division is capable of generating sufficient cash flow to compensate for the investments made.
At the same time, despite the number of implemented projects and new areas of the Division’s activities, operating expenses do not show a tangible increase. Thus, the increase in operating expenses in 2023 compared to 2022 was only 5%, which indicates efficient management of assets, technical and human resources.
Data centre network development
The Information Technologies Division (IT Division) successfully maintains its leading position in the market of data centres and cloud services in Kazakhstan. According to IDC, the Company’s share in the data centre market is about 52%, and in the domestic market of cloud services – 31% (taking into account cloud service projects implemented on the basis of Kazakhtelecom’s data centres).
Today the Company maintains a network of 27 data centres in major cities and regional centres of the republic. This is about 1,600 racks.
In 2023, the Division completed the organisation of two new modules with a capacity of 84 racks in the modular data centre of Almaty – the newest data centre in the Company’s network. Accordingly, the total capacity of the data centre was 168 racks. In 2024, the Division intends to complete the organisation of a new hermetic zone with a capacity of 44 racks in the data centre of Akkol. It also plans to build a new TIER III level data centre in Astana for 300 racks, where demand is currently growing exponentially.
Cloud services development
In terms of developing cloud services and expanding their range, the IT Division is developing its own infrastructure of virtual resources and infrastructure solutions on the basis of its own data centres, as well as in cooperation with partners. As part of this direction, we organised a new virtual data centre site in Almaty, where the solution is supported by updated VMware licenses of the latest version. In 2024 the Company plans to migrate existing sites to the new version and develop the range of IaaS services. In the same part, we plan partner co-operation with cloud service providers to develop PaaS/IaaS solutions. At the end of 2023, Kazakhtelecom JSC and Smart Cities LLP signed an agreement on cooperation in the design and development of new cloud IaaS and PaaS services with self’s services functionality on ismet.kz. Already today, the Company’s customers can purchase two products on the portal – Virtual Computing Resources and S3 Object Storage. In 2024, we plan to expand the range of products with the development of capacities on the resources of Kazakhtelecom’s data centres.
In December 2023, Kazakhtelecom and Smart Cities LLP, a member of BTS Digital’s AITU digital ecosystem, signed an agreement on co-operation in developing cloud technologies in Kazakhstan, as well as expanding the line of cloud solutions and products.
Kazakhtelecom have already presented the first few joint cloud services on the ismet.kz business portal: Virtual Computing Resources and S3 Object Storage.
At the next stage, Kazakhtelecom intends to connect its own infrastructure to the cloud products of the partner company. This will make it possible to combine high reliability and data security provided by Kazakhtelecom on the basis of its own network of data centres with high quality and prompt service of Smart Cities. In addition, in 2024, the companies intend to expand the range of cloud products and services through joint developments. One of the priority joint products to be launched in the near future will be joint cloud products for IT developers: Kubernetes as a Service and analytics service – Database as a Service.
Infrastructure and IT architecture development
One of the important 2023 results for the IT Division was the successful certification of the IT service management system “Information Technologies. Service Management”. Now, Kazakhtelecom has the international certification ISO/IEC 20000-1-2016 confirming its IT services quality.
As part of the project to modernise and improve the Company’s IT infrastructure, the IT Division installed and commissioned new highperformance server and network equipment. We upgraded the corporate network core, and launched a large programme to upgrade network segments in the regions. In 2024, the Division plans to complete global modernisation. The IT infrastructure will fully meet business expectations in terms of fault tolerance, reliability, performance and speed of response to changes in business requirements.
In addition, Kazakhtelecom launched a fault-tolerant, geographically dispersed site for the Company’s key IT systems. Most of the systems have already migrated to the new site. The Division plans to complete the migration process in the first half of 2024.
As part of ESG initiatives, the IT Division implemented a project to reduce electricity consumption by personal computers. In practice, this resulted in the setting of energy saving policies on all these devices that made it possible to achieve a total saving of about 900 MW of electricity consumption in 2023 alone.
In 2023, the IT Division also carried out significant internal work to migrate the Company’s main information systems from a monolith to a microservice IT architecture. Microservices make it possible to promptly make changes to a particular system without affecting others. This ensures a faster process of introducing new services, and also provides higher fault tolerance and flexible scalability. Currently, the Company have already implemented several tasks, including the transfer of the Oracle ASAP system to microservice architecture. There, the IT Division developed two sets of microservices for activation/deactivation of GPON resources and telephony network objects. The result was the reengineering of business processes lowing the time of order processing at the stage of resource activation, reducing the number of manual operations, the number of returns to previous stages, etc.
Based on the results of order execution under the new scheme, all data is uploaded to the Big Data system to analyse for incorrect data in technical accounting systems and minimise errors. As part of the migration to microservice architecture, in 2024 the IT Division plans to complete work in such monolithic systems as Amdocs, Sputnik, Remedy, Siebel CRM. Of the proprietary software, the Company will retain the following information systems: Small Word, Cramer, SAP, Genesys. They will support the requirements of open interfaces and microservice standards. At the same time, the SAP system will be transferred to the SAP Hana multi-model database management system.