Better late than never. Nearly a year after Microsoft Corp. and a month behind DigitalOcean Inc., Amazon Inc. has finally brought its cloud platform to India. The company will now provide infrastructure services to local organizations from two Availability Zones in busy Mumbai, which was incidentally also one of the first regional expansion destinations for Redmond.

There are two main reasons why cloud providers are so keen to establish facilities in large markets like India. The first is that keeping data locally is much more convenient for customers than moving their records to the nearest foreign jurisdiction with an AWS or Azure data center. As a matter of fact, organizations in regulated sectors such as financial services, healthcare and government are outright prohibited from storing certain sensitive information overseas. Those organizations will now be able to utilize Amazon Web Services much more extensively than they could before meaning more revenue for Jeff Bezos’ firm.

The other motivation behind today’s expansion is latency. Enabling local customers to store workloads closer to home shortens the distance that requests have to travel over the network, which improves response times. And if needed, application speed can be improved even further using the edge services that Amazon is rolling out in Mumbai, Chennai, and New Delhi alongside the new Availability Zones. The lineup includes the company’s Cloudfront content delivery network, its Route3 domain name system and private connectivity options from regional partners. Dedicated links are much faster than public carrier infrastructure, but come at a premium that is only justified by certain high-priority workloads like databases.

Now that Amazon, Microsoft and DigitalOcean have all set up shop in India, it’s likely  only a matter of time until the industry’s fourth biggest cloud provider – Alphabet Inc. – follows suits. The company has all the more reason to do so since one of the main focus areas of its platform is analytics, a use case that is especially affected by latency and data sovereignty laws.

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