Microsoft recently expanded its cloud infrastructure in India by opening its fourth cloud region in Hyderabad. This move comes as more companies are shifting their workloads and AI applications to cloud platforms.
The India South Central region in Hyderabad is now available, joining Microsoft’s existing regions in Pune, Chennai, and Mumbai. This new region includes three Availability Zones designed to support business continuity and critical workloads while adhering to Indian regulatory and seismic-zone requirements.
Azure Availability Zones provide physically separate data-centre locations within a cloud region, ensuring high availability and disaster recovery by distributing workloads across independent facilities.
Several early customers, including Adani Group, HDFC Bank, Bajaj Finance, and PB Pay, are already using or planning to use the new region. These companies have highlighted the region’s support for data residency, disaster recovery, additional computing capacity, and cloud/AI workloads.
HDFC Bank, for example, plans to leverage the Hyderabad region for disaster recovery, business continuity, and AI initiatives. The bank sees the additional capacity as crucial for supporting high-performance workloads.
The Reserve Bank of India’s data-localisation rules require payment-system providers to store payment-system data within India, influencing where regulated financial workloads can be hosted and backed up.
Microsoft’s investment in cloud and AI infrastructure in India underscores the growing demand for such services in the country. The company’s commitment to expanding its presence in India aligns with the broader trend of increased cloud spending and adoption of AI services among Indian businesses.
Overall, Microsoft’s expansion in India reflects the company’s strategic focus on providing proximity, sovereignty, and resilience in its cloud and AI offerings. The new Hyderabad region is part of Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure, which spans over 80 regions across 34 countries.
As cloud providers like Amazon and Google also ramp up their investments in India, the country has emerged as a key market for hyperscale cloud infrastructure. With the continued growth of public-cloud services and AI spending in India, the demand for secure and reliable cloud solutions is set to rise significantly in the coming years.
