Data Backup Digest

What is seen by some as a bid to keep up with their top competitors in the region, Flipkart and Microsoft, the team behind Amazon Web Services has recently announced an initiative aimed at building five new datacenters in the city of Mumbai. As such, Amazon is hoping to grab their share of the booming cloud computing market in the area.

Although the campaign was originally scheduled to start in December 2015, Amazon experienced some temporary setbacks and delays that caused them to modify the timeline. Work officially began on the project at the end of February 2016. An estimate for completion has not been giving at the time of this writing.

Current Customer Base

While the five Amazon datacenters in Mumbai might be new, the retail and cloud computing giant's presence in India has long since been established. In fact, they currently boast some of the largest clients in the region.

Andy Jassy, senior vice president with AWS, was quoted in a press release as saying: "Tens of thousands of customers in India are using AWS from one of AWS's eleven global infrastructure regions outside of India. Several of these customers, along with many prospective new customers, have asked us to locate infrastructure in India so they can enjoy even lower latency to their end users in India and satisfy any data sovereignty requirements they may have."

Future Group, for example, hosts a number of supermarket stores as well as outlets in the niches of fashion and general retail merchandise. As they are based out of Mumbai and are already customers of Amazon Web Services, the recent construction of five new datacenters is certainly good news as far as they are concerned.

Tata Motors Limited is another client and user of AWS. Also headquartered in Mumbai, Tata Motors relies on AWS to let their customers monitor and track their fleet vehicles in real-time. They also use AWS to complement project planning and production scheduling.

Jagdish Belwal, chief information officer with Tata Motors, was quoted as saying: "Whenever we plan on rolling out a new project or experimenting with a new technology, AWS helps us in quickly provisioning the required infrastructure and enables us in getting up and running at a fast pace. AWS has helped us become more agile and has drastically increased our speed of experimentation and therefore, innovation."

Additional companies in the area who already use AWS include names such as ZEDO, Hike, PayTM, STAR India, Manipal Global Education, NDTV, HackerEarth, Inmobi, Freshdesk, Classle and more. They also boast numerous consulting and technology partners, including the likes of Frontier, Adobe, Druva, SAP, Accenture, Intelligrape and many more.

Looking Toward the Future

Apart from the clients they're already working with, Amazon expects the recent move to garner even more interest in AWS in the coming months and years. Considering the rapid increase in cloud usage throughout Mumbai and the surrounding areas, the move comes at the perfect time.

To find out more information about Amazon Web Services, including any of their endeavors both domestically and abroad, please visit their official website at aws.amazon.com.