While it’s fair to have the data reside in the country, it can be a challenge if a calamity strikes. This can even affect the DR site, says Vikas Gupta, Head IT, Essar India in an interview with Abhishek Raval
Your views on the entry of international public cloud data centre (DC) providers after the Indian Government’s push for data localisation?
From the times when Suzuki was allowed to bring in their Maruti, there have been revolutionary changes in the product availability as well as the price points at which they are available. So the entry of foreign partners should be looked at from the perspective of the product and services offering availability than a point that they pose a threat to their local and Indian counterparts.
For foreign MNCs, it will be an adaptation challenge. Moreover, the Government’s push will help localization of a global product from giants, which may lead to yet another business opportunity.
But a counterpoint on localization is that any data center has two faces- Primary and DR. No organization will prefer both the primary data center and DR in a single geography. From the perspective of data residing in the same country, it’s paradoxical. Then, what about a DR site, which is primarily set up as a fallback mechanism? What happens in the instance of a Tsunami like calamity, which has the potential to affect the primary and the DR site at the same time. Aren’t both the sites at stake?
The larger issue is of data secrecy and ethics compared to data residing in the same country.
For that purpose, regulators the world over should widen the scope of criteria to be set for setting up local DCs. It has to be widened beyond the point of localization. There is total justification in data localization – some reasons being regulatory; some related to data security, some may be due to political implications while some may be due to data accessibility issues.
Do you mean to say, the DR site need not be in India?
I, by any means, am not for or against the DR site being located in India. Today cloud is more appreciable a business proposition than anytime earlier but is the threat of data piracy averted there? The mindset has changed from merely data secrecy and at the same time the data secrecy is not being compromised.
Further from any organization’s perspective, there are other important customer related regulations which need to be put in place to avoid any misuse than merely the location of the data. The age of community sharing has probably arrived and that’s why probably we are talking of the fast paced adoption of cloud. Have you heard of “Global Seed Vault” in Svalbard? Well that’s the key to the existence, not the one that we are fearing today. Over a period of time, the regulations will mature to create a global seed vault for data too.
What impact can natural catastrophes like the Tsunami have on the data center industry?
The data center industry is driven by a few critical factors like cheaper bandwidth, abundance power availability, cheaper manpower etc. Over the last many years, places like Vietnam, Philippines, Australia have emerged. Earlier, the optic-fiber cable was not available across the globe. Wherever it was, the price was prohibitive. However now, they have been laid out at most of the global locations and the costs are also fairly cheap. So till the above concerns are addressed, any kind of calamity is bound to have a far reaching impact.