Indian Economy News

IBM’s first cloud data centre in India to focus on private services for SMEs

Bengaluru: IBM is setting up its first cloud data centre in India to gain a bigger share of the cloud computing market in the country. The company has built a 30,000 sq ft data centre facility in Airoli, on the outskirts of Mumbai. The new Mumbai IBM Cloud Center is part of a 15 cloud center expansion, and a $1.2 billion investment by IBM Cloud to grow its cloud presence around the world.

"With the new data centre, IBM will be able to tap into BFSI, telecom and government sectors, which haven't been able to move to cloud in a big way due to regulatory requirements," said Lingraju Sawkar, director, Integrated Technology Services, Global Technology Services at IBM India/South Asia. According to Gartner, public cloud services market in India is expected to grow from $423 million (Rs 2,550 crore) in 2013 to $1.3 billion (Rs 7,800 crore) in 2017. Gartner expects India to be the fastest growing market for cloud adoption globally.

IBM recently partnered with SAP to host SAP's HANA Enterprise Cloud on IBM cloud. The new data centre in Mumbai would allow SAP to offer its cloud-based platform to Indian customers who have been wary about their data residing in other countries. IBM is also providing resiliency services through the new facility to let enterprises continue with their business during a disaster.

Enterprises across the world have started demanding cloud providers to host their data locally to meet requirements for data sovereign. About 100 nations and territories have already adopted laws that dictate how governments and private enterprises handle personal data. This demand is especially high in banking & financial, telecom and government sectors and is pushing large cloud players to set up local data centres.

Microsoft, for whom India is the fastest growing cloud computing market, announced last month that it will set up cloud data centres in India by the end of 2015. CEO Satya Nadella called cloud computing services in India a $2-trillion market opportunity while announcing the plans in Delhi. Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos also talked about the possibility of local data centres in India during his visit last month.

Despite this, none of the large cloud computing companies, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft, has so far built a local data centre. Unpredictable power supply, patchy Internet connectivity, limited bandwidth and unreliable optical fibre connectivity between different parts of the country have so far prevented these companies from setting up data centres in the country.

However, with cloud adoption rapidly increasing, companies are finding ways around this problem. "Getting redundant power supply is still a challenge in India and also one of the largest costs for a data centre," said Sawkar. "We are, therefore, using multiple sets of power equipment, multiple bandwidth providers and redundant security monitoring systems to ensure reliability."

The new IBM data centre in Mumbai will primarily focus on private cloud services for enterprises and small and medium businesses. However, the company is expected to announce another data centre in India, which will cater to IBM's public cloud service called SoftLayer.

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

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