DataCenterNews Asia Pacific - Specialist news for cloud & data center decision-makers
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Wed, 22nd Mar 2023

OVHcloud, the European cloud data centre provider, has launched its first data centre in India as part of its Asia Pacific (APAC) expansion plans. In addition, the company will see the deployment of two additional data centres in Australia and Singapore by next year.

Adding to OVHcloud’s network of data centres 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 amidst sharper regulatory scrutiny over data sovereignty and environmental concerns. 

For India, cloud-enabled digital transformation is driving the explosive growth of the national digital economy, which already outpaces the growth of the larger economy by 2.4 times. 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. India, Australia and Singapore remain critical markets that are driving this growth from a business transformation and digital innovation perspective,” says Michel Paulin, Chief Executive Officer, OVHcloud. 

“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 centres will further help OVHcloud’s goal of becoming the cloud provider of choice for customers in the region, in enabling them to remain compliant while benefiting from our unique proposition of an open, reversible and sustainable cloud.”  

OVHcloud's new data centre in Mumbai will offer Indian businesses enhanced support through local computing and storage capabilities to meet evolving data compliance needs, especially as the Indian Government 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 to spur further growth of the Indian digital economy. 

Launching the new facility is also timely, particularly as India takes the presidency of G20 with a mandate of "data for development". India has set up a new Trade and Technology Council with the European Union to lead on digital transformation, green technologies and trade and implement data regulations such as the recently released Digital Personal Data Protection Bill.

With these policies in place, data residency in India remains a critical compliance criterion for businesses within the financial services and pharmaceutical sectors.

As a pioneer in sustainable cloud, OVHcloud has been deploying 20 years of industrial innovation, such as circularity and water cooling at scale. These disruptive innovations enable the company 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 servers, OVHcloud's integrated industrial model enables a sustainable cloud by design, with a Carbon Usage Effectiveness of 0.2. Furthermore, benefiting from OVHcloud's proprietary water cooling technology, this new data centre 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. The strategic deployment of our first data centre in India is a firm testimony to that potential, and an affirmation of our commitment to customers and partners here,” says Terry Maiolo, Vice President and General Manager, APAC, OVHcloud. 

“Our new generation of data centres, 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 optimised 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 and minimised latency between India and Europe. In addition, with the newly launched data centre, local customers will enjoy close to instant access to their data and cloud resources while meeting increasingly stringent data compliance regulations.