Microsoft has made some significant announcements on its cloud strategy in India. The software giant has shared updates on its local data centres.
As part of today’s announcements, the company has launched three centres in Mumbai, Pune, and Chennai; and said that its commercial cloud services will be available from these data centres.
Microsoft Azure services is launching today, and Office 365 services will be available from October 2015. Dynamics CRM Online services will follow suite early next year.
Prior to the announcement, Firstpost reached out to Greyhound Research CEO Sanchit Gogia to understand what exactly this announcement would mean for Microsoft India and its customers. On which, he said, “If this announcement happens, it would present lot of opportunities for Microsoft as well its customers and partners. Earlier, customers in banking and financial services and insurance (BFSI) and more specifically in the government had apprehensions using Office 365 because until now Microsoft had no local data centre in the country; and they had to go for hosted exchange.”
“With the local data centres, Microsoft should be able to offer a locally hosted model where the data would reside in the country, which will address the data privacy for compliant and regulated industries such as BFSI and the government,” Gogia added.
“Overall, it’s a very exciting time for the data centre market in the country. Most of the customers now would be able to use public cloud with still being compliant, which otherwise they were not able to.”
“IBM, Netmagic, AWS, and Azure are top four cloud vendors in India, and Google is doing well on the SaaS side,” Sanchit Gogia said.
Local data centres mean organisations in India will benefit from data sovereignty and lower latency.