Hybrid cloud to give edge to Microsoft in India

Propelling competition in the hybrid cloud business market, leading technology player Microsoft has made it clear that its three data centres in India will be operational by the end of this year.

In an interaction with Deccan Herald, Microsoft Corporation India server and cloud business director Srikanth Karnakota said the data centres will play a major role in the data security and give a hybrid cloud model in India.

“Google and AWS do not have on premise storage facility. They are purely cloud born companies. Once our data centres are ready, we will get the flexibility, which is a beautiful differentiator,” he said.

To provide the on premise cloud facility, every year Microsoft invests globally around $5 billion in setting up data centres and its operations.

“India is a phenomenal cloud market and it is growing every second. In India, we do not have legacy IT infrastructure as we have many SMBs and startups that are having greenfield in IT infrastructure. They are looking for a full cloud which can be built for scale,” he said.

Karnakota said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in July announced the action plan for opening data centre in India as part of its efforts to connect Indians as well as Indian businesses to the world through its cloud service.

“Local data centre is part of our efforts to expand business in India. It will open up new opportunities in the country as they will find on premise data centres. Besides financial sector, which comprises many public sector banks, the country is home to many state-owned enterprises and other enterprises that do not want to put everything on cloud and want data to be stored in the country itself,” he said.

Microsoft has a total dominance over Indian cloud marked business compared with other players like Google, Salesforce, Dropbox and AWS. “We are the number one in the Indian cloud market, which is currently $800 million, since we have capability in the entire cloud space to provide IaaS and PaaS with entire suite of products. Besides our productivity suite Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility Cloud Suite, we have a cloud platform Azure and CRM Dynamic Online,” he said. 

He said the SMEs and startups are availing the cloud facility by connecting their service APIs on the cloud service as infrastructure and platform service.