Amazon Web Services builds 5 data centres in Mumbai

Mumbai: Amazon's cloud service arm Amazon Web Services has built its data centres in around 5 locations in Mumbai, as it looks to tap on the growing potential of the Indian e-tailing and cloud computing space, said sources privy to the development.

The move comes at a time when Amazon's closest rival in India, Flipkart, has already started moving its data centres in-house, while Microsoft has brought online three cloud data centres in Mumbai, Pune and Chennai to improve the performance of Azure services for Indian customers. IBM is also looking to build its data centres in India.

EThad reported last year that India's biggest e-commerce company Flipkart, which is valued at more than $15 billion, started moving its data centres in-house to build its own network of India's largest server farms, that may be opened up in future for use by other online companies, potentially moving towards a model pioneered by Amazon in the global markets.

"The company has built its data centres in around 5 locations in Mumbai as India's cloud computing space has become extremely important for Amazon," said a source close to the developments.

The data centre was initially scheduled to start in December last year, but due to some delays from the company's side, the new facility will now be operational by end of this month, the source said.

According to industry experts, global companies with customers in India can use AWS's infrastructure to build their businesses and run their applications in the cloud. This move will also help AWS to securely store the companies data in India with single-digit latency said an industry expert.

Amazon already has a sizable customer base in India, including several offline and online retailers, including Future Group, Jubilant Foodworks and Paytm, that are currently being served mainly out of their data centres located in Singapore.

The bandwidth required to run this data centre is taken from one of the top telecom operators in India, said one person close to the development without naming the company. The cloud services market in India is expected to reach $1.9 billion by 2018, as per Gartner estimates. 

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.