The colocation and data centre services market in Bengaluru and other Indian cities has the potential to leverage key aspects like reducing CapEx, scalability, multi-tenancy, and others. Colocation services made up 78.5% of the market revenue in 20191. Their growth will be driven by big enterprises in verticals like IT/ITES, media, OTT, and BFSI (Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance), which need full management control over their operations and stringent data confidentiality.
Additionally, cloud service vendors also need colocation services to accommodate their infrastructure so they can efficiently deliver their services to clients. The Indian data centre sector attracted about $396 million worth of strategic and private equity investments in the first three quarters of 2020[1].
Need for Data Centre Services in IT
The IT sector in Bengaluru uses well-equipped data centre services to efficiently manage data. Today, data centres are more than just storage facilities and deliver tools and services to support the critical operations of IT businesses. Currently, there are 26 colocation data centres in Bengaluru [2]. Let’s look at the benefits data centre services can deliver to IT companies in Bengaluru:
Consolidated Leadership
IT businesses can use the enterprise-grade infrastructure offered by data centre services to adopt stable governance and centralized management, which can help to improve business decisions.
Minimized Barriers
All departments in a company share the same capital expenditures, investment plans, ideologies, and business processes. However, the organization often has dispersed locations, services, and products that reduce customer engagement across the various company operations.
Efficient data centre services can help enterprises to reduce operational barriers that impact customer service. They provide convenient data flow and management to help you bolster your customer engagement ability across your processes.
Better Margins
IT companies are increasingly investing in strategic data centre services and solutions to avail service efficiencies, data security, and scale cost. These services enable IT firms to customize their solutions to local needs without affecting the elemental business process. Growing firms can use the technical resources offered by data centre services in a prompt and cost-effective manner.
If you need less storage or fewer systems, your vendor can easily reduce deployments. IT companies can access these pay-as-you-go data centre services and pay costs based on their service use.
Data Security
Every enterprise needs to protect its confidential business data. Data centre services offer the monitoring processes and expertise needed to pinpoint breaches and risks quickly and rectify them effectively. A lot of providers present multi-tier infrastructure to secure sensitive business information.
The data centres are physically guarded with security systems, intruder alarms, and access management and surveillance tools. Data centre services include fast recovery and quick data retrieval during emergencies and natural disasters.
Types of Data Centre Services
Now, let’s look at the common types of data centre services that are popularly used and provided by operators:
Hybrid Data Centres
Hybrid data centre services help companies to utilize new technologies and provide ideal solutions to security and scalability. These facilities have mixed storage and computing environments. They combine the advantages of public cloud and/or private cloud services, as well as colocated data centres, enabling enterprises to swiftly respond to evolving business needs. Hybrid cloud allows users to get a flexible and comfortable middle ground to treat all their workloads cost-efficiently and properly.
On-Demand Managed Connectivity Services
It can take a lot of time for companies to quote, order, and deploy incremental bandwidth or new connectivity. The solution is to use on-demand managed connectivity services that are a good alternative to costly static connectivity services. Further, on-demand services permit enterprise applications to customize their connectivity criteria. This enables organizations to control their network use in a cost-efficient manner.
The existing sales process for connectivity services is mainly manual, error-prone, and time-intensive. On-demand services automate this business layer to accelerate and simplify the collaboration pace among operators. This saves time for service providers, decreases their OpEx, improves their efficiency, and empowers them to gain more business growth opportunities [3].
Benefits of Carrier Neutral Data Centres
Carrier-neutral data centre services offer more interconnectivity options and allow companies to select a solution that meets their specific requirements. These services reduce the risk of data loss and downtime as you can connect your business network to multiple carriers. If one fails, you can always quickly shift to another to keep your critical systems operational.
Carrier-neutral facilities allow you to select a suitable network for your business that can scale to meet your requirements over time. Plus, you can easily port to another carrier if your present one does not meet your demands, without needing to shift physically.
Lastly, carrier diversity can help IT companies maintain their performance by using redundant and highly reliable network connectivity.
STT GDC India commands more than 33% revenue market share in the Indian data centre market and operates 18 facilities in nine cities.
Note: 1 is taken from the Frost and Sullivan white paper
