With some states like Maharashtra putting in place a Cloud policy, Ritesh Sachdev, Head, Occupier Services, India, and Managing Director, South, Colliers International India, advises occupiers to scout for data centre opportunities in Pune and Navi Mumbai, apart from IT centres like Bengaluru and Hyderabad. “Mumbai and Chennai are the preferred location choices for most data providers for being the submarine data cable landing spots on the Indian west coast and east coast respectively,” explains Dr Niranjan Hiranandani, Founder & Managing Director, Hiranandani Group. Accordingly, the Group has allocated 50 acre from its land bank for this development, which is near the major international fibre landing stations. In 2017, we announced that we would be investing $ 0.5 billion in India, starting in Mumbai, says Praveen Nair, Sales Director, Bridge Data Centres. “After this data centre is made operational by Q2 2020, we will consider whether to follow it up with a second data centre in Mumbai or look at Bengaluru, Hyderabad or Pune.” Linode, the largest independent open cloud provider in the world, has recently opened its 10th data centre in the world in Mumbai, its first in India. “Mumbai is an optimum city to launch cloud hosting services because it is the landing zone for subsea cables on the west coast of India and is a huge data centre market and also India’s financial capital,” explains K Ashwin Kumar, Director, Linode Data Centre Operations India. “Also, we see Mumbai as a right and easy zone for doing business in India. As our business grows, Linode will look to expand to other locations in India, perhaps to cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai, which have good connectivity and the right infrastructure for data centre operations.” WebWerks India has six state-of-the-art data centres in India, in Mumbai, Pune and Delhi. These are ISO 9001:2015, ISO 27001:2013 and ISO 20000-1 certified as well as Uptime Institute and SAP-certified. “WebWerks India plans to invest in major metropolitan cities where there is huge demand for our services and where our experienced R&D team senses the biggest opportunity,” says Nikhil Rathi, Director, WebWerks India. “We evaluate our options before investing in a specific location.” Indeed, informed decisions are the way to go. CHARU BAHRI