Modi government’s efforts at data localization are inevitably producing some concrete results witnessing the falling prices of data storage and the growth of the server market at double-digit. The increasing competition in the data storage sector will bring the prices down, and improve the quality of infrastructure. The fall in data storage prices will help the IT startups- which spend a good amount of budding capital in the data storage.
International Data Corporation, the premier market intelligence firm has predicted a 20% growth in the Indian server market in for the second quarter of the ongoing fiscal year.
“The impact of various domestic data center players would be felt in Q2 (this quarter) and the latter half of the year as well. Investments from Reliance would have an immediate impact on the server market at the end of Q2. We are unclear about the Adani Group center investment plan. We are expecting QoQ (quarter-on-quarter) growth of 20 per cent for the x86 server market at the end of Q2,” said Harshal Tarkeshwar Udatewar, market analyst for servers at IDC India.
The Indian server market registered a 16.2 per cent decline in revenue in the first quarter of this fiscal year with 298 million dollars. But the investment from telecom behemoth- Reliance Jio has pushed the sector northwards in the second quarter. A few other companies which are expected to make a huge investment in establishing centers are Adani Group and Hiranandani Group.
Various firms are expected to invest 50,000 crore rupees on cloud infrastructure in the next three years, the majority of this spending will go for the purchase of servers as it is a most important part of cloud infrastructure. “Initiatives from Reliance, Adani and Hiranandani will help many small and mid-size companies to host data locally, helping them perform better and provide better services to their customers, at a fraction of the original price,” said Anjani Kommisetti, country manager at Raritan & Servertech.
So far, the Indian market has been dominated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google and these companies charged high prices due to lack of competition in the market. But with the entry of domestic conglomerates, the rules of the game will no longer be the same. “Cloud players like AWS and Google will have to come up with new, perhaps cheaper pricing models for India,” said Satyajit Sinha, an analyst at tech consultancy Counterpoint.
Modi government has brought Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018 for mandatory data storage in the country. The government is of the view that privacy of individuals must be maintained and their data must be stored locally. The Modi government has to face the ire of global corporations and foreign governments including that of Trump administration.
However, in a stern commitment to the national interest, Modi government has been very firm on India’s data sovereignty and policymakers including former CEA Arvind Subramanian and industrialists like Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani and others have supported the stand of the Modi government.
Data localisation will be beneficial for the protection of the privacy of individuals and maintaining India’s data sovereignty. Given the fact that data is being considered as the new oil, India’s capacity building in storage is necessary and in the national interest. Industrialists like Mukesh Ambani hold to key to ensure that the Googles and Amazons of America have sleepless nights as India gears up to own and protect its data.