The Indian government plans to open data center parks in India

With the elongated lockdown and the resultant stay-at-home requests, organizations across India managed supply chain shortages and log jams, and were re-adjusting their IT infrastructure strategies to work without on-premise access or having a strong infrastructure to guarantee business congruity and downtime prevention.

The Covid-19 outbreak restored that India needs undeniably more data center capacity than we right now have. Data centers were scrutinized as an enormous workforce out of nowhere moved to remote working during the worldwide emergency. Organizations could access, oversee and process their data from a remote area because of data center networks working max speed, to such extent that data center services were being named as one of the fundamental services.

Today, India’s data center footprint is assessed at 11 million square feet. It is probably going to develop to 30 million square feet by 2030 and could maybe cross 100 million by 2060 containing 5,000 edge data centers the nation over.

As per Arizton’s research, India data centre market is expected to be valued at roughly $4 billion by 2024.

The demand for data center and cloud solutions was already on the ascent because of data localisation, and it has additionally expanded dramatically during the pandemic. Working from home has boosted the demand for Software as a Service (SaaS), which is driving colossal traffic to data centers. Companies are hoping to reevaluate and are preferring third party cloud and data center service providers.

The growth needs to be fueled by a robust strategy on data centre parks. The Indian Government ought to urge the private sector to set up data center parks in significant metros ideally or the secondary metros. Further, there should also focus on making edge data centers in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities to resident technology comprehensiveness in the country.

Indeed, even before the COVID-19 outbreak, the Indian government was already empowering data center development. On Feb. 1, India’s union finance minister Nirmala Sitharam mentioned that the government intends to help the private sector construct server data center parks throughout the country.

“Right now, there is no huge foreign investment in data centres in India. There is no arrangement or system right now on how these worldwide data centres hubs can be made in India. If the government has a clear strategy and policy around it, India could fundamentally turn into a data centre hub for global enterprises,” said Vishal Malhotra, tax partner at Ernst & Young (EY) covered by Mint.

The budget follows the necessity for data localization for most organizations under the Personal Data Protection (PDP) Bill 2019, which will be made into law soon. Notwithstanding, data localization will not be the lone driving concept for the data centre policy, as such parks can create business worth billions of dollars every year.

The government should likewise take a look at measures, for example, build optical fiber connectivity, design special tax policies and guidelines aimed at sustaining the data center players, ensure sufficient power capacity for data center parks, guidelines aimed at sustaining the data center players, provide other necessary infrastructure around the data center parks, introduce clean energy incentives for the utilization of renewable energy such as solar/wind power, etc.

Rapid adoption of cloud in the country with technologies like AI/ML, Big Data Analytics and Digital India initiative by the Indian government are prompting large data generation in the country.

In conclusion, the anticipated personal data protection policy will prompt a flood of data storage requirements in the country as major global services providers working in the nation would be ordered to store the data locally in India. The data center prerequisites could go from 10 million square feet to 30 million square feet in the next ten years. Analytics Insight