Data centres upbeat over rising Cloud demand

Hyderabad: Data centre workers are keeping services like banking, OTT, telecom, medical activities up and running during the lockdown but are rarely seen or heard. Policemen, doctors and nurses are visible but the men and women working in data centres are not, but their work is critical as they ensure the back-end systems keeping online services running smoothly.

Like the policemen and doctors, who worked for days on end, data centre workers too have. Nikhil Rathi, CEO, Web Werks says, "Our employees stayed inside the data centre for 120 days. We booked a hotel in Mumbai and they ensured that work was not affected.

A data centre is like a power plant and the employees understand the criticality of their work and the growing demand to store data in the cloud." Post lockdown, people started working from home and businesses made a shift to cloud resulting in huge demand for it.

Even small businesses are migrating to the cloud. Nikhil says, "Even a kirana store person is now using payment gateway and taking money on UPI. There is not a single sector left which is not looking to use technology."

When asked if the data centres are prepared to handle the demand, Raghavan, an expert on data services says, "On this front there is no issue and the industry is prepared." There are just about 12-15 commercial data centres in the country with a majority based out of Mumbai.

With the pandemic accelerating the migration of businesses to the cloud, experts project Rs 50,000 crore spend in the coming years in India. Companies have been looking to migrate, but the Covid-19 pandemic has further hastened the process for cloud infrastructure. Nikhil says, "The demand for video conferencing, hosting webinars, ERP solutions and accounting has doubled."

"Bandwidth demand is growing with each passing day, no one expected the lockdown to continue for such a long time. With the realisation to cut cost dawning, almost everyone is looking for virtualisation," says R V Mohan, an IT consultant. There is a spike in demand for internet bandwidth thanks to people getting hooked to video streaming during the lockdown.