Hyperscale Data Centers to Power India as a Global IT Hub in 2020
Thanks to the Indian Government’s digital drive and the competitive pricing of mobile internet, India has become one of the enormous consumers and prolific generators of data. This rofuse transaction of data necessitates the retention of the phenomenally huge amounts of data in storage centers of equally colossal proportions.
Data centers outside India are catering to the storage requisites of the flourishing IT trends in India. This has jeopardized the security of business-critical information of MNCs and the sensitive personal information like, “usage history, browsing data, a sketch of our internet behavior, preference data, facial recognition tools and more - all collected on a daily, hourly and per minute basis” [1] .The Indian Government has concurred to resolve the question of data security through Data Localization, a concept that mandates the storage and processing of “data on any device that is physically present within the borders of a specific country where the data was generated”[2]
True to the phrase “Data is the new oil”, [3] the advent of Data Localization and the massive inflow and outflow of data have caught the attention of the local and international Data Center (DC) players. In its report titled India viewpoint: Is India the next frontier for the Data Center Industry? CBRE Group, Inc., states that “DC market in India is expected to double its size in 2018 from about USD 2.2 billion in 2016. Moreover, the country is also expected to become the second largest DC market in Asia-Pacific by 2020. It is already the second largest DC infrastructure market and the second-fastest growing DC market in APAC after China.”
Another report by Cushman and Wakefield has indicated that “digital data in India was around 40,000 petabytes in 2010 and is likely to shoot up to 2.3 million petabytes by 2020 (where we are almost, already) - twice as fast as the global rate. If India houses all this data, it will become the second-largest investor in the data center market and the fifth-largest data center market by 2050.” [5]
With such prolific forecasts on the cards, presently the existing players are meeting the need for DCs by creating and expanding facilities as and when required. But, Hyperscale Data enters have already begun to mark their existence; a few examples being:
[i] Yotta, the infinitely scalable Data Center parks by the Hiranandani Group, is located at major fibre landing stations of Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, and Chennai. These are Uptime Certified Tier 4 Data Center Parks offering 11 DC buildings with capacities of 60,000 racks, 500 MW and 6 Million sq. ft. of Data Center space. [6]
[ii] Colt Data Centre Services (Colt DCS) is planning to build a hyperscale data center campus in Mumbai, with a power capacity of up to 100MW. [7]
[iii] Adani Group has partnered with the San Franciscobased Digital Realty to jointly develop and operate data centers and cultivate undersea cable provider communities of interest across India. [8]
Similarly, many local and international conglomerates have piled up to capitalize on the want for purpose-driven Hyperscale DCs in India. BroadGroup, in its comprehensive report titled Data Centres India, forecasts “accelerated growth in 2020 with a 49% leap in m2 space compared to the end of 2018”.
Authentic forecasts such as the ones featured above are luring the nations of the world, especially the Southeast Asian countries to look at India as their choicest destination for data center outsourcing. This encouraging scenario has poised India towards achieving a goal of the Indian Government’s National Policy on Information Technology, 2012, which is to make India a prominent Global Hub and destination for IT and ITeS by the year 2020.