State bodies increase corporate VPN purchases but spend less

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State-owned companies and institutions have significantly increased the number of corporate VPN solution purchases at the beginning of 2026, but overall spending on such projects has sharply decreased.

In the first quarter, the number of procurement procedures grew by 22.6% compared to the same period last year. A total of 1,016 tenders were conducted under the Russian federal laws on state and corporate procurement, No. 44-FZ and No. 223-FZ. These data were reported to the newspaper "Vedomosti" by Yuri Drachinin, deputy head of the product group at IT developer "SKB Kontur".

Despite the increased activity of buyers, the total value of contracts has sharply decreased: while in January-March 2025, procurement volume reached 6.9 billion rubles, in 2026, the figure amounted to only 2.02 billion rubles.

The reduction in spending is also reflected in the average contract size. The initial maximum purchase price decreased by 76.2% to 1.98 million rubles. According to the expert, this trend is explained by a change in the procurement structure. If a year ago VPN solutions were more often part of large-scale comprehensive IT projects, now buyers are purchasing them as a separate product.

An additional factor was the redistribution of budgets to related areas of information security. Some organizations prefer to purchase not standalone VPN services, but comprehensive solutions - secure remote access systems, network protection tools, firewalls, cryptographic gateways, and secure communication infrastructure, combining security functions into a unified architecture.