The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), on Thursday, released a consultation paper on regulatory framework for promoting data economy through establishment of data centres, content delivery networks, and interconnect exchanges in india and sought comments from stakeholders to understand growth prospects for data centres in India.
It has raised some issues including the economic/financial/infrastructure/other challenges being faced in setting-up a data centre business in the country, what measures are required for accelerating growth of data centres in India, and how data centre operators and global players can be incentivised for attracting potential investments in India.
“The Indian data centre market size is projected to reach $1.5 billion by 2022, growing at a CAGR of 11.4 per cent, and is expected to reach around $5 billion by 2025. The market is primarily driven by growing internet penetration, increased cloud adoption, government’s digitisation initiatives, and the push towards data localisation,” TRAI said in the paper.
Issues
The world is going digital at a pace faster than expected. Partly, this is driven by the pandemic-induced global lockdown, which has resulted in a data surge arising out of increased digital social interactions and online transactions, it said.
TRAI has also sought comments on issues such as if there are any specific aspects of the disaster recovery standard in respect of data centres that needs to be addressed, whether trusted source procurement should be mandated for data centre equipment and whether they should be mandated to have security certifications based on third-party audits.
The authority has requested for comments from the stakeholders by January 13, 2022 and counter-comments, if any by January 27.
