Microsoft is adding nearly 2,000 customers in India every month for its ‘commercial cloud’ even as there is a ‘gold rush’ for adoption of cloud-based information technology services by clients, its Corporate Vice-President (Developer Division) S Somasegar said.
With over 250 million Indians using Internet-connected devices, there is a huge demand for cloud services. Recently, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella announced plans to set up three data centres to offer Azure and Office 365 services from local data centres in India by end-2015. Under a cloud, a client need not invest upfront to buy software and hardware but can outsource these from Microsoft for a monthly fee.
Imagine a building that can park two Boeing 747 jumbos. Well, that’s the storage size of a data centre with nearly 600,000 servers that Microsoft builds globally. It is possible that a same size building could be built in India to store huge amount data for various clients, Somasegar told
Microsoft delivers over 200 cloud services, including the search engine Bing, MSN, Outlook.com, Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Xbox Live and the Azure platform. Over one billion customers and 20 million businesses in 90 global marketplaces use its cloud services. The services are hosted in Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure comprising over 100 globally distributed data centres, edge computing nodes, and service operations centres.
Cloud is transforming the entire IT landscape of India and not just businesses, governments are actively moving service delivery mechanisms to the cloud, Somasegar said. India is a major contributor to Microsoft’s global cloud business. Customers such as Bajaj Finance and Fortis Hospitals have adopted Microsoft’s cloud technologies, he said.
Clients are moving to cloud for three benefits — economy, agility and scale — with small and medium size enterprises being the early movers. Large companies are still emphasising on the issue of data security but will eventually move to the cloud. Sectors such as financial services, retail and hospitality are adopting the cloud services faster, he said.