The increasing data usage driven by social media activity, online gaming and streaming entertainment is likely to drive the need for more edge data centre in locations beyond the metros
Owing to the incentives announced by the government, India, currently home to more than 80 third party data-centres, is witnessing significant investments by domestic and global data centre companies. According to a NASSCOM report titled, ‘India – The Next Datacentre Hub’, there are 25 operational projects, 20 under development projects, 20 announced projects and five planned projects in the country.
The Indian DC industry is expected to more than double from its existing capacity of 447 MW to 1007 MW by 2023, according to Rachit Mohan, Head, Data Centre Advisory – India, JLL.
As per Nokia Mobile Broadband India Traffic Index, due to increased usage of smartphones and fixed wireless access, overall data usage increased by 36 per cent in 2020. Principally, India’s 447 MW of co-location data centre capacity and telecom network had provided this digital connectivity.
While 2020 was a challenging year for businesses, five years’ worth of digital growth was witnessed happening in a matter of months. Digitisation became an integral part of businesses, enabling not only smooth functioning but also facilitating continuity of entire economies, according to Milind Kulkarni, SVP Digital & IT & Cyber-security Head of STT GDC India.
Many enterprises have to move on from traditional infrastructure to meet the demands of an increasingly digital business world, with the pandemic creating a massive migration of critical business applications towards the cloud to facilitate remote working.
“To deal with the distributed workforce, enterprises need to put cloud resources closer to the user to address latency issues and security requirements without compromising performance. Notably, the need for hybrid multi-cloud solutions is evident across global enterprises”, Manoj Paul, Managing Director, Equinix India.
JLL’s Rachit Mohan believes that Cloud migration is expected to increase in 2021 due to flexibility and security, lower costs and higher performance. The increasing data usage driven by social media activity, online gaming and streaming entertainment is likely to drive the need for more edge data centre in locations beyond the metros.
There’s increasing adoption of emerging technologies such as AI, ML, 5G and IOT, as enterprises continue to evolve in their digital transformation journeys. These workloads deal with massive amounts of data and require huge storage, scalability, flexibility, and Hyper Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities.
“It requires large CapEx and skilled resources to build these capabilities in an on-premise environment. Realising this, more and more enterprises are turning to third-party data centre companies that can provide hyper scale infrastructure, managed services, HPC capabilities, security and disaster recovery and a host of application-layer solutions on an OpEx model”, said Israni.
“Large enterprises have been pushed to significantly upgrade their IT infrastructure to address increased digital usage. Enterprises have been upgrading their IT infrastructure by adopting hybrid models, given their budget constraints. However, going ahead, competitiveness and digital readiness will drive the up-gradation of IT infrastructure,” said Mohan.
Through a push for data centre infrastructure development, through MeITY’s Data Centre Policy, the Government of India is supporting data-centres’ growth.
“The data localization initiatives by the government, to ensure data of Indian consumers are stored on servers in India, will also have a cascading impact on data centre demand. Multi-cloud/hybrid cloud is the key to innovate in this dynamic environment”, Rajiv Sodhi, Chief Operating Officer, Microsoft India.
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