OVHcloud, a European cloud leader, has announced the launch of its first data center in India, as part of its Asia Pacific expansion plans which will see the deployment of two additional data centers in Singapore and Australia by 2024.
Adding to OVHcloud’s network of data centers worldwide, the new Mumbai facility is part of its recently announced global strategic plan to build 15 new sites by 2024. The global expansion will provide OVHcloud customers with open, trusted, sovereign and sustainable cloud solutions that will enable them to meet growing digital needs.
The announcement comes at a crucial time for the Asia Pacific region, which has witnessed an uptick in cloud adoption amid sharper regulatory scrutiny over data sovereignty and environmental concerns. Particularly for India, cloud-enabled Digital Transformation is driving explosive growth of the national digital economy, that already outpaces growth of the larger economy by 2.4x.
Additionally, under the Digital India government campaign underpinning a concerted push for Digital Transformation on a national scale, business and government sectors are both set to increase their reliance on the cloud.
“Since the expansion of our presence in the Asia Pacific market, the region has experienced phenomenal growth of its digital economy,” said Michel Paulin, Chief Executive Officer, OVHcloud. “India, Singapore and Australia remain critical markets that are driving this growth from a business transformation and digital innovation perspective. Data sovereignty and sustainability will continue to be key priorities that have to be balanced with rapidly increasing digital needs.
“We are confident that new data centers will further help OVHcloud’s goal of becoming the cloud provider of choice for customers in the region, enabling them to remain compliant while benefiting from our unique proposition of an open, reversible and sustainable cloud.”
OVHcloud’s new data center in Mumbai will offer Indian businesses enhanced support through local compute and storage capabilities to meet evolving data compliance needs, especially as the Government of India pushes for more comprehensive data protection laws to go along with a growing digital economy. The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, National Data Governance Framework policy and IT Rules, introduced in the last two years, collectively aim to balance data governance efforts with unlocking data-enabled innovation that will spur further growth of the Indian digital economy.
The launch of the new facility is also timely, particularly as India takes presidency of G20 with a mandate of ‘data for development’, sets up a new Trade and Technology Council with the European Union to lead on Digital Transformation, green technologies and trade, implementing data regulations such as the recently released Digital Personal Data Protection Bill – which complies with international standards of data protection including the GDPR by enacting a strong consent-based regime of data privacy. With these policies, data residency remains a critical compliance criterion for businesses within the financial services and pharmaceutical sectors, in particular.
As a pioneer in sustainable cloud, OVHcloud has been deploying 20 years of industrial innovation such as circularity and water cooling at scale. As such, these disruptive innovations enable the group to reach best in class sustainability metrics, with a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) at 1,28 and a WUE (Water Usage Effectiveness) of 0,26. By manufacturing its own servers, OVHcloud’s integrated industrial model enables a sustainable cloud by design, with Carbon Usage Effectiveness of 0,2. Benefiting from OVHcloud proprietary water cooling technology, this new data center pushes the group’s technological and industrial expertise further by adapting its infrastructure to meet tropical conditions.
“Already one of our top-performing markets in the APAC region, India continues to demonstrate remarkable potential for business growth,” added Terry Maiolo, Vice President and General Manager, APAC, OVHcloud. “The strategic deployment of our first data center in India is a firm testimony to that potential and an affirmation of our commitment to customers and partners here. Our new generation of data centers, coupled with enhanced compute and scalable storage capabilities, will elevate our ability to provide customers in India and the region with high-performance cloud solutions that have optimized and predictable price-performance ratios, even as their needs evolve.”
The expansion leverages OVHcloud’s existing presence in India through the Mumbai Point of Presence which opened in 2020, minimizing latency between India and Europe. With the newly launched data center, local customers will enjoy close to instant access to their data and cloud resources while also meeting increasingly stringent data compliance regulations.
Following this launch, customers in the Asia Pacific region can anticipate the deployment of upcoming data centers in Singapore and Sydney by next year. With these additions, the Asia Pacific data centers will account for six out of OVHcloud’s global network of 48 data centers by 2024.
