A thriving data center and cloud services market in India is spoiling CIOs with choices. Along with the established providers, there is a huge influx of local vendors. AI-enabled solutions, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and identity as a service are a few of the many recent offerings by these vendors. And that’s not all: The Indian market will double its load capacity by 2025, which stands at 800 megawatts currently.

The cloud services and data center market in India has matured over the past 8–10 years. Tech execs and CIOs now have more and better options to choose from. CIOs and tech executives need to focus on the following while choosing new cloud services, data center, and colocation partners:

  • Choose a seamless, full-stack multicloud platform as the complexity and number of cloud vendors increase. This will provide a transparent view of the entire cloud deployment and enable dynamic orchestration for deriving maximum cost benefits. AI-enabled cloud abstraction and orchestration is in demand and would see a lot of traction. AI-enabled cloud orchestration will help reduce cost of cloud operations, manage sprawl, and improve governance.
  • Privacy and data protection laws have warranted the need for sovereign clouds. These are clouds that firms can deploy within their geographic boundaries and use to adhere to all local privacy and data protection laws. Both local vendors and cloud services deployed by hyperscalers as a country-specific deployment have an edge while servicing regulated sectors such as banking, financial services, insurance, and healthcare.
  • Consumers of data centers and cloud services are getting sensitive about sustainability and environmental issues. Data centers and cloud service providers that adhere to accepted environmental, social, and governance (ESG) norms would be preferred over the noncompliant ones.

With demand for data centers and cloud services growing exponentially, vendors providing AI-enabled multicloud platforms and adhering to local laws and ESG norms will find preference with CIOs and tech executives.

Read my latest landscape report, The Data Center Colocation And Cloud Services Landscape In India, Q2 2023, in which we evaluate 14 service providers. This report discusses the complete list of functionalities supported by each vendor, along with their core strengths across use cases. I also touch upon the future of this market and how one should work with these vendors. I’m happy to get on an inquiry call with you should you wish to know more.