The Indian data center market has observed significant growth. This is owing to the adoption of advanced technologies that is used to build digitally intelligent enterprises. All industry verticals have started to adopt advanced technologies for bolstering the growth. As the 2^nd-fastest upcoming digital nation with several initiatives that are undertaken by banks, organizations, financial institutions as well as Government institutions, there is a huge amount of data being generated.

Now the question of data security comes up with such huge amount of data being generated by these institutions. Therefore, for securely storing the data, the industry leaders have started focusing towards the state-of-the-art data center facilities in the country.

The demand for data localization & the emergence of indigenous cloud & data center providers coupled with the surge in demand for data localization has led to immense growth of Data Centers in the country.

Some of the challenges in setting up data centers include distance related constraints, capacity constraints, increasing data security concerns and operation constraints.

Capacity constraints:

The huge volume of data that come in and exit the data center, has an impact on the efficiency of the center and therefore, providers have to permit the transmissions to take place at greater rates. And this should be done across any distance since transmission with higher rates facilitate in enhancing the data center’s capacity limits.

NTT Communications renders data center services that include storage establishment, collocation services and processing facilities.

Operation constraints:

Owing to data sources proliferation, there should be a transformation in how the data enters data centers. And this should happen from manual to intelligent programs. Since the manual operations are complex, prone to errors as well as labor-extensive, automated processes help in accelerating the speed as well as accuracy of data. Apart from these, the specific ground-zero challenges should be addressed. While a data center infrastructure has various assets such as cooling systems etc, it may also possess specific complex systems that are running. And it is not so easy to monitor the KPIs.

GOI’s role in addressing data center challenges

 The Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology released a tentative draft of the data center policy under the GOI in Nov 2020. The governments looks forward to boost the data centers setting up tasks in India by leveraging this policy and it looks to render a continuous power supply which will drive the data center infrastructure.

By enabling the data center parks to have their power generation segments by utilizing renewable energy sources. With an aim to address these concerns, which are connected to data center establishments at the same time promote data localization, the GOI can collaborate as well as invest with indigenous data center providers.

Impact of pandemic on data center sector

In order to address the challenges by pandemic, organizations as well as businesses are leveraging digital technologies. As organizations did not adopt digitalized strategies industries were disrupted by their operations during the different phases of pandemic. But there were smart firms & digitally mature enterprises that managed to win during the tougher times since they all adopted remote working.

These firms utilized cloud-based applications that were hosted with data center providers. One such data center provider is ESDS. ESDS has data centers located at Bangalore, Nashik and Mumbai.

Trends in Data Center sector

The Green data centers

Since organizations have started to focus on rendering green solutions the green data centers concept has grown to a greater extent. Also, the major central phase of any green data center is within minimal environment impact & higher energy efficiency. These play a major role in decreasing carbon footprint. They use lower space & energy while the design & operations are environmental friendly.

Immersion Cooling data centers

Although the immersion cooling data centers are still at the initial stages, they will play a significant role in revolutionizing the industry. These are silent with zero-noise levels. Furthermore, it leads to a safer working environment and facilitates energy efficiency as well as cost savings, while decrease the energy consumption by sixty percent.

The road ahead

The capacity of data center sector in the country is anticipated to register a 5-fold growth. This market is observing significant growth that is bolstered by hyper-scalers such as AWS, Microsoft, FB etc which are outsourcing their storage requirements to 3^rd party Data center providers.

“The favourable regulatory support, rapidly growing cloud computing, increasing internet penetration, Government effort on digital economy, adoption of new technologies (IoT, 5G etc), growing needs of hyper-scalers are some of the major factors driving the demand for data centres in the country. The sector is likely to witness a five-fold increase in capacities in the next five years,” said Rajeshwar Burla, Group Head, Corporate Ratings, ICRA.

The data center services market is anticipated to reach USD 105.6 billion by 2026, globally. The major factors bolstering the market growth include an increase in the number of SMEs adopting digital technologies, the development of IoT & ML technologies, the next normal in the form of remote work, a surge in the use of OTT services, increasing industrial sector leveraging digital technologies, and digitization of existing processes.