Amazon to launch AWS data center infrastructure for India in 2016

Amazon has revealed that it’s expanding its public data center infrastructure to India to satisfy a growing demand for its cloud-based service in the region.

Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers cloud computing services for companies of all sizes, negating the need for these firms to have their own on-site servers. There are currently 11 AWS “regions” globally — the U.S. West (California and Oregon), U.S. East (Virginia), Brazil, Europe (Germany and Ireland), East Asia (Tokyo and Beijing), Southeast Asia (Singapore), and Australia (Sydney). There is an additional AWS “GovCloud” in North West U.S., designed specifically for government agencies.

While thousands of firms in India already use AWS, the launch of a local server infrastructure effectively lowers the latency, making the transfer of data between clients and Amazon’s servers faster. Moreover, local data centers help to “satisfy any data sovereignty requirements they [customers] may have,” explained Andy Jassy, senior vice president of AWS, in a press release.

Data sovereignty basically refers to the concept that data stored digitally should be subject to the laws of the country in which it is located. Indeed, Amazon says that “several” of its existing Indian clients have asked the company to house its server infrastructure locally.

AWS is now a $5 billion business in its own right, and has emerged at the forefront of the cloud infrastructure market ahead of the likes of Google, Microsoft, IBM, VMware, and Rackspace. In a review last year, analyst firm Gartner estimated that AWS had five times more computing capacity than the 14 other key vendors. Amazon today claims more than one million AWS customers, including startups, enterprises, and government bodies, across 190 countries.

Amazon hasn’t revealed exactly where its new data center will be based in India or when it will open, but it will be sometime in 2016.