For every organization and nation, data has become an indispensable asset in today's digitally connected world. This data has become a vital asset especially for India because here over 1 billion population are generating the data every single time as individuals open and use an application or log in to a website or even purchase something from online markets. So, as more individuals go online, more information is turned digital. This data generated currently is stored outside the country at the company's data centers.

According to the report from Cushman and Wakefield, digital data in India was around 40,000 petabytes in 2010 and is likely to reach 2.3 million petabytes by 2020, twice as fast as the global rate. This is driving data center infrastructure spending in India, which is estimated to touch from US$4.5 billion in 2018 to US$7 billion by 2020. Moreover, the nation will become the second-largest investor in the data center market and the fifth-largest data center market by 2050. And this explosion is largely driven by data localization.

Data Localization is an act of storing data on any device that is physically present within the borders of a specific country where the data was produced. It mandates that organizations gathering critical data about customers must store and process them within the borders of the country.

Data Localization benefits Indian Data Center Market

With the concept of Data localization, India requires better IT infrastructure like sophisticated data centers to store and process customer-focused data. This will strengthen the Indian data center market and enable to create innovative solutions for data centers to augment the capacity and secure the information stored in that particular data center simultaneously.

The data center industry in India is mainly propelled by the availability of ample real estate and competitive policies, along with ICT-capable human resources, and the continuing growth of India's mobile market and internet penetration.

Data is the new oil of every country and requires amplified security protocols. So, keeping in mind, the central government of India, in 2018 budge, has accentuated the significance of increasing cloud and data center investment in the Indian market. Although, as data growing at such an exponential rate, India's current infrastructure is likely to fall short.

So, taking benefits from the Indian data center industry, many countries, especially from South East Asia, are now looking towards India as the most preferred destination for data center outsourcing. Hyderabad is the major city for data center operations in Telangana, which has a presence of more than 10 facilities in the Indian market, growing at the fastest CAGR of almost 19 percent. Mumbai in Maharashtra region is the hub for facilities deployment by major companies including Microsoft, Alibaba, AWS, and Google.

If the Indian government will pass the Data Nationalism bill, most major companies, both from overseas and local those are hosting data outside the country, will need to comply and host the data in India, and will create a large amount of business in Indian data center industry.