Amazon’s Cloud Service AWS Records A Profitable Year In India

Amazon’s cloud services unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has announced a profitable fiscal year in 2018. Launched in 2006, AWS rents out server space and bandwidth to companies of all sizes with cloud computing capabilities, thus negating the need for them to have their own on-site servers.

According to a filing with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, AWS posted a threefold increase in revenue from operations at INR 1,206 Cr for FY18 from INR 397 Cr in the previous year.

“The growth primarily reflects increased custom usage of cloud-related services, partially offset by pricing changes,” the company said in the filing.

At the same time, Amazon Internet Services (AISPL), which undertakes the resale and marketing of AWS in India, reported a profit of INR 28 Cr, compared with an INR 10 Cr loss the previous year.

The revenue for AISPL consists of proceeds from the sale of compute, storage, database and other cloud-related service offerings (including training) for startups, enterprises, government agencies, and academic institutions in India.

In December last year, AWS announced that AISPL achieved full Cloud Service Provider (CSP) empanelment and successfully completed the Standardisation Testing and Quality Certification (STQC) audit from the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for cloud services delivered from the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region.

With this certification, AISPL joins a list of approved providers that meet predefined government standards of quality, availability, and security.

With 52 global security certifications, attestations, assurance programs, and quality audit already achieved, such as ISO 9001, SOC1, SOC2, and SOC3, AWS claims to be the first global cloud service provider to earn this status in India.

Globally, AWS reported $6.6 Bn of revenue in Q3 2018, while competing with players like Microsoft’s Azure as well as Chinese ecommerce company Alibaba’s Aliyun and Google’s cloud services.

Amazon is finally turning its fortunes around, after pumping in billions of dollars into the country since 2016. The company has already announced a profitable fiscal for Amazon Transportation Services and has also recorded a sharp increase in revenue from Amazon Pay.

With a new data localisation policy in force, Amazon is now working to align with the government requirements which calls for keeping data generated about Indian customers within the country.