Increased demand for Internet bandwidth due to nationwide lock down

Work from home & entertainment exerting demand on data centers

Wednesday, 1st April 2020

As an attempt to stop the spread of COVID-19 pandemic, nationwide lockdown is imposed for 21 days. For people are working from home as well as using video streaming and online gaming, there has come a persisting demand for the data centers to maintain their operations with the help of available minimum number of personnel.  

Nikhil Rathi, CEO of Web Werks says,”hosting and cloud computing have both proliferated in the past one week and there has been a tremendous growth in demand for co-location”. Rise in internet traffic since last Tuesday has been two to ten times, as recorded in Web Werks!

Data centers have to now fulfill the demand for equipments (almost 8 times higher) and more requests are being made for cloud infrastructure and virtualization. One good thing is that there is very less demand from offices as a result of lock down. This lets data centers to balance capacity smoothly. Currently, it is not possible to acquire new servers and data centers must provide additional capacity making use of already existing capacity, as suggested by Sharad Sanghi, CEO of Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure (India), at NTT-Netmagic. They have recorded that it is possible to increase internet bandwidth for 25-30% using clud-based service and VPN.

Providing maximum uptime will ask for incessant monitoring, maintaining and processing from the data centers, especially when they provide other important services. As Piyush Somani, CEO of data center operator ESDS rightly says, “The biggest challenge with data centre service providers...is more to do with the safety and availability of data, making backups, disaster recovery and BCP services on click”. According to most of the operators in data centers, there is enough capacity to meet the rising demand for the coming few months. Hence, it will be made sure that there will be no disruption in service as data centers are trying their level best to bridge the gap.