At a time when many companies are ruing over the loss of business opportunities and fall in revenues, data centre operators in the country are reaping a windfall. The operators, totalling about 12 in the country, saw traffic soaring by 15 per cent since November 8, 2016 (last two months), and expects it to rise further in the coming months.

“For data centre companies, the business has been good as there has been an increase in data traffic, usage of network infrastructure and storage space. With more and more digitalisation happening across the country, there is an increase in demand for cloud and data centre space,” Sharad Sanghi, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer at Netmagic (an NTT Communications company) said.

Long-term gain

“The demonetisation is helping us on a near-term basis, but expecting a boom in market in the long-term we have been increasing our data centre capabilities,” Sanghi added.

Digital transactions in the country have surged by 400-1,000 per cent since the government announced the discontinuation of old ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes. E-wallet transactions had risen to 63 lakh per day from 17 lakh, with value of transactions rising to ₹191 crore from ₹52 crore, Law and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had said on December 9, 2016.

“Investments in data centres are expected to increase due to surge in data traffic as a result of demonetisation. So undoubtedly demonetisation has benefited the industry; necessarily may not be the biggest beneficiary. However, the data centre managers need to first look for optimising the current infrastructure in terms of storage and compute capacity of the servers,” said Sanjay Motwani, Regional Director (APAC), Raritan International, a data centre solutions provider. According to an earlier report by Internet and Mobile Association of India, India’s data centre infrastructure market is expected to touch $4.5 billion by 2018, while the country is poised to be the second-largest market for data centres in Asia-Pacific by 2020 and the investments are expected to reach $7 billion.

“There is a clear increase in transactions facilitated by the use of technology, in particular, mobile technologies. This increase in transactions, the traffic being directed to these channels and data that are being generated are all reasons to believe that there will be an increase in the compute and storage capacity that will be required,” said K.N. Murali, Head (Solutions & Professional Services) at Dimension Data India, a data centre solutions provider.

Demonetisation has resulted in an increase in digitalisation, while emerging technologies such as cloud and Internet of Things are expected to further increase data centre traffic.

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