Cloud is for everyone, but not for anyone

Looking at some recent forays made by cloud behemoths like AWS triggers a new question in the cloud market—are new segments like startups and PSUs the next pot of gold? How easy is to slide on the rainbow that lies ahead of this pot—especially when there are bumps like need for customization, customer responsibility and legacy baggage dotting this curve?

- Pratima H

Tis the winter season. The time for looking at 'white' in a new way. And what's whiter than snow? Cloud?

A snowball? Both, together? A snowball always starts with some silent snowflakes that start rolling at some point, at some place.

It was in 2011 that AWS announced the opening of its first office in Mumbai. Later in 2016, the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region was launched with two Availability ones (AZs) - marking it as the sixth AWS Region in Asia Pacific (APAC). In May 2019, AWS came with a third Availability Zone in the AWS  Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, which, as it said, was needed to support the rapid growth of the AWS customer base in India. In November 2022, AWS rolled out its second region in India - the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region, consisting of three AZs. The construction and operation of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region is estimated to add approximately US$7.6 billion (approx. 63,600 crores) to India's GDP by 2030.

This the company said - was to boost India's digital transformation and was a part of its long term investment in the country so that customers and partners in India can have additional regional infrastructure to deploy applications with greater resilience, availability, and even lower latency. In October 2022, AWS added a new AWS Local Zone (LZ) in Delhi. Also Amazon CloudFront has 33 Points of Presence in India, across Bangalore (four), Chennai (seven), Hyderabad (three), Kolkata, India (two), Mumbai (ten), and New Delhi (seven).

In short, AWS-as stated by it-has a long-term commitment to India-reaffirmed in May 2023, with plans to invest US$12.7 billion in India by 2030 into its local cloud infrastructure.

Between 2016-2022, AWS invested US$3.71 billion in India. The market and potential for companies like AWS, in other words, have been snowballing into something bigger and different-and at quite a breakneck flow.