“Tens of thousands of customers in India are using AWS from one of AWS’s eleven global infrastructure regions outside of India. Several of these customers, along with many prospective new customers, have asked us to locate infrastructure in India so they can enjoy even lower latency to their end users in India and satisfy any data sovereignty requirements they may have,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, AWS.
AWS competes with Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, and IBM Softlayer. Microsoft announced earlier this year that it will be setting up three data centers in the country by the end of this year (private preview of cloud services from India data centers is scheduled for next month). The Redmond-based company has been aggressively expanding over the past few months, including the announcement to support Linux. IBM established its first data center in Mumbai last year, and is expected to setup its next one later this year. Apart from improved latency speed, having data centers in a local region also ensures that the data from the clients aren’t crossing the geographical boundaries, especially in the wake of Snowden revelations. And the government’s Digital India initiative is a plus too.
