Google opens its second ‘Cloud Region’ in Delhi NCR as India’s digital economy prospers during pandemic

The adoption of cloud computing is on the rise in India as both small and big enterprises are moving to the cloud in a bid to innovate and cut costs. The pandemic and the switch to remote work and dependency on video conferencing are accelerating moves to the cloud.

Kurian said Google’s cloud platform will help organisations transform their businesses into a digital business model and that will only help India achieve its digital ambitions. Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are the ‘big three’ public cloud vendors in the world and all are eyeing India for the next big growth opportunity.

The adoption of cloud computing is on the rise in India as both small and big enterprises are moving to the cloud in a bid to innovate and cut costs. (Image credit: Google)

“When you look at our cloud region in Delhi-NCR, similar to the cloud region in Mumbai, you have a variety of different capabilities. You can run compute, storage, networking at scale, handle advanced cybersecurity protection with our security tools,” Kurian said. He further added: “Developers can use this platform to build new applications and can also help organizations migrate existing applications to our cloud.” All these big cloud platform vendors use Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) as a business model, where a third-party provider hosts and maintains core infrastructure on behalf of a customer.

Kurian said the company has seen enormous growth in demand for Google Cloud services in India and expanding its footprint in a new cloud region gives it the ability to offer more capacity for growth over many years. Google counts Airtel, TVS, HCL among others as its cloud customers in India.

Its competitors, including Microsoft and Amazon, are also aggressively expanding by inking partnerships with India’s top companies as well as wooing young startups and government agencies to offer their cloud services. India’s public cloud market, according to market research group IDC, is expected to be worth $7 billion by 2024.

Kurian sees education institutions as the key beneficiaries of its cloud computing technology, especially now when many educators are adopting a “hybrid” approach to teaching. “The use of conferencing technology by educational institutions has more than tripled during 2019 and 2020,” Kurian told indianexpress.com. “We see people continue to use these tools to learn and grow even beyond the period of the pandemic.”