“Data is the new oil – whoever controls data, controls everything!” — It is truly an alarming statement. It is also said that in the future, wars will be fought over claims to large database.
India is becoming a substantial data consumption market with digital data consumption expected to increase twice as fast as the global rate – from around 0.6 zettabytes in 2013 to 6 zettabytes in 2020. The key drivers for this growth are sectors like insurance, banking, telecommunications, IT, digital commerce, social media, and the government sector. In 2018, the Indian data centre infrastructure market was valued at US$27 billion, which by 2020 is expected to be the second largest market within the Asia-Pacific region.
While India presents a tremendous business opportunity, risks and significant obstacles also exist. Key factors such as regulatory policies, energy, water resource, network bandwidth, and the risk and management of natural disasters are areas identified as preventing market forces playing its due role. The book titled “Data Sovereignty: The Pursuit of Supremacy” identifies the risks and gaps in these areas and attempts to set a clear objective for regulators to formulate a business-friendly, unambiguous, and strict policy environment for the data centre business in India.
The book also focuses in-depth on the steps and concrete actions required to build highly capable data centres ensuring data security, and implementation of well-thought-out policies, procedures, and laws on data sovereignty to ensure that India allays all fear of ‘Data Colonisation’ well in time. According to the author of the book, Vinit Goenka, Secretary, Centre for Knowledge Sovereignty (CKS), the impact of these steps, as presented in the book, would be a radical breakthrough in the ease of doing data centre business in India.
