Pune to house one of three Microsoft data centres.

Microsoft Corporation will start three data centres, or the Indian data centre region, by the end of this calendar year. One of the centres will be set up in Pune. The company refused to divulge the location of the other two.

Worried over security of data, governments across the globe are making it mandatory for cloud firms and those who put their data on the cloud to host the data in that particular country.

While part of the data could be put on a public cloud, sensitive data are required to be hosted in a particular geography. Microsoft wants to tap the cloud business opportunity in India by launching the dedicated data centres.

The company, which launched a major cloud business push after its CEO Satya Nadella took charge last year, has doubled its data centre regions in the last 12 months. From just 8 centres 12 months ago, it will have a total of 19 centres by the year-end.

Microsoft India Chairman Bhaskar Pramanik told BusinessLine on the sidelines of the Microsoft Azure Conference recently that the firm would launch a drive to tell Indian customers about the importance of moving to the cloud. The data centre would also help build a developers'\ ecosystem and start-ups.

The rugby-field-size data centres will be built in such a way that they can scale up capacities in phases. The company, however, refused to divulge the level of the investments going into the centres. 'Globally, we have invested $4.5 billion on building the data centres, with a cloud business run rate of $4.4 billion,' he said.

The two-day Azure conference discusses technologies and services that are being built on the cloud.


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