Amazon’s cloud computing business officially inaugurated its first data center infrastructure in India with the launch of two data centers in Mumbai, which becomes the 6th AWS Region in Asia Pacific bringing the global footprint of AWS Regions to 13. Local server infrastructure enables a quicker transfer of data between clients and Amazon’s servers. However, more importantly, local data centers help satisfy “data sovereignty” concerns, as data stored digitally is subject to the laws of the country in which it is located. Amazon said that some of its customers had requested local server infrastructure for just that reason. Some of AWS’s India clients are: Ola Cabs, NDTV, Tata Motors, Macmillan India, Hotstar, and redBus.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy, who was in Mumbai for the launch, said the company had built a base of 75,000 active customers (those who use the service at least once a month) even without a data center in India and he expected the number to rise significantly with the launch.
Early last year, the company’s head of sales and marketing told Times of India that it had 12,000 customers. The latest figure indicates a six-fold jump since then. It is also 7.5% of AWS’ customer strength of 1 million globally, a substantial proportion for a single country, according to Venture Beat.
AWS has emerged as one of Amazon’s most lucrative businesses, netting the company $2.5 billion in Q1 2016.
