CtrlS Emerging as World’s Largest Rated-4 Hyperscale Datacenter Player

Today, Data centers are the enablers of Indian Digital Economy. They will play a key role in enabling the Netizens in India as all cloud players, e-commerce players, banks, insurance companies, gaming, OTT players are hosted in third party data centers

Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Founder and CEO, CtrlS Datacenters Ltd.

How is the datacentre industry growing worldwide, Could India to be the next hub for massive growth of Data center in Asia? What kind of growth you see and do you think there is demand supply gap?

World over there are an estimated 7.5 million data centers. This includes on-premise as well as service provider data centers. However, there are just about 500 Hyperscale data centers globally and we own six of them in India. Secondly, India is well endowed with a 1.38 billion population, hence consumption is driving the economy. COVID-19 has certainly disrupted us at the moment, but once we recover from the same, India’s consumption will continue to grow.
 

As far as the demand-supply is concerned, India enjoys a data center footprint of 5.9 million square feet.

What is your take on data centers as the key enabler to success of India’s digital economy?

With 450 million social media users, 627 million internet users, we are amongst the largest consumers of internet, which is why you Netflix, Hotstar, Amazon Prime have become a household name in the country. Applications such as WhatsApp, PayTM, Google Pay have revolutionized the way we communicate and transact money. India also has the highest average data usage consumption per smartphone at 9.8 GB per month.

Our per capita data consumption is estimated at 11 GB per month and this is likely to grow to 30 GB in less than five years. This very growth will see rise in online transactions, e-commerce purchases, social engagement, watching movies online, internet based education, where schools are now delivering education through e-learning, telemedicine will also witness rapid growth. This will give rise to two things digital consumption and more and more global entities attempting to attract Indian consumers online.

Today, Data centers are the enablers of Indian Digital Economy. They will play a key role in enabling the Netizens in India as all cloud players,e-commerce players, banks, insurance companies, gaming, OTT players are hosted in third party data centers.

There is surging demand for edge data centers, which is emerging at faster speed, How are you prepared to take this as an opportunity?

With 290 million internet users in rural India, and that number likely to double in the next five years due to changes in consumer behaviour, there is an anticipate demand for OTTs, online gaming, distance education, e-commerce, financial transactions, access to mobile apps etc. To ensure the servers are accessed with minimal latency, there is a compelling need to move data to the edge, giving rise to edge data centers in the country. This is very much an opportunity and we are planning 1,000 edge data centers. We will be rolling out edge data centers in about 20 locations in smaller cities of India.

With this increasing going remote, digital communication becomes more of a necessity. Regular employees are going for WFH (Work From Home) and given ayccess to use data connectivity to communicate with each other. How CtrlS is seeing this as opportunity?

India is now emerging as one of globe’s largest contact less economy due to COVID-19. Coronavirus is a lethal virus. It has already consumed close to 400,000 people across the world and over six thousand in our country. This has led to lockdown thereby compelling business to enforce work from home. This perhaps will be a new normal in the next six months. We too are planning to ensure that at least 80% of our staff works from home permanently, so that they enjoy safe health.

Likewise, all major businesses have implemented work from home solutions, We have had the privilege of supporting around 1,000+ business in enabling their work from home solutions through our Desktop as a Service combined with Cloud and Data Leakage Prevention (DLP) software. We see COVID-19 as an opportunity. In fact, our work from home has led to growth of productivity by 60%.

The data centers have multi-layered and constantly-upgraded security systems in place to prevent data theft. Can you share the uniqueness of Six Rated-4 Datacenters in India.

We are India’s 1st and only Rated-4 data center who is certified on all four parameters such as Architectural, Electrical, Mechanical and Telecom. We are also World’s 1st LEED Platinum certified v4 O+M certified Green Data Center.

As far as uniqueness is concerned, our Hyderabad facility is India’s first Tier-4 (Now Rated-4) data center, Mumbai is Asia’s Largest Rated-4 Data center. Our Noida data center is India’s 1st and only 100% Quake Proof Plus 100% pollution free data center. This is very special, as NCR region suffers from air pollution and the sulphur content is extremely high with a tendency to corrode (rust) the metal eventually leading failure of servers and storage. We therefore took the opportunity to build an air filtration plant which processes the contaminated air, scrubs it and releases clean air into the data center – which is both good for IT infrastructure and human lungs

High capacity data centres offer much higher uptime compared with a legacy setup that an organisation might have internally. Demand for Flexibility is always on demand, What are the readiness from CtrlS, in terms of building capacity for the future?

Today we own and operate around 1 million square feet of Rated-4 data center space in the country and serve 60 of the Fortune 500 and 108 of the ET 500 companies in India. To address the anticipated growth in the country, we are planning an additional 5 million square feet of Rated-4 data center space in India. By, 2024 we will be operating 6 million of Rated-4 data center space in India powered by 600 MW of power and with a capacity of 125,000 plus racks.
 

There is an exciting time ahead with the demand for localised data centers, which hold the key to the future. It will provide impetus to the global digital economy while keeping data secure locally. How do you see another billion dollar opportunity?

India’s Personal Data Protection Bill 2019, has laid down the guidelines for storing of personal data, sensitive personal data and critical personal data. This will lead to large growth of data storage in India. India data centers will see a large surge of demand from cloud players, financial services players, telecom operators, OTT, e-commerce, gaming, education, manufacturing, retail and other sectors resulting in data centers contributing heavily to the Indian economy besides fuelling employment opportunities in the country.