Cloud services providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), Microsoft Corp., and Google Inc., are pulling out all stops to increase their market share in the country even as they are making, or planning to make, significant investments in local cloud infrastructure. The Indian cloud market has already seen “over $1 billion of investment”. Most cloud companies have either set up local data centres in India, or are in the process of doing so to better serve the needs of Indian enterprises and SMBs (small and medium businesses). Cloud providers are setting up local data centres for two reasons. One, having a data centre close to where an enterprise is based cuts latency, the time taken by data to travel from point A to point B in a network. Second, it takes care of the regulatory requirements in sectors such as banking that mandate business-critical data to be hosted within India. One of the key drivers, he added, is the software-as-a-service (SaaS) sub-segment, which is estimated to grow faster than IaaS and PaaS (platform-as-a-service). While all the big cloud providers try to woo enterprises to sign up for their particular cloud offerings, analysts believe they will continue to co-exist. The RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report, for instance, points out that cloud users are running applications in an average of 1.5 public clouds and 1.7 private clouds.

(Live Mint)