War Hits Global Data Centres: Cloud Resilience, India’s Role In Focus

Earlier this month, amid the major conflict between the US-Israel combine and Iran in the Middle East, Amazon’s cloud services company, Amazon Web Services data centre facilities were impacted. 

At least three of AWS’ data centres, two in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and one in Bahrain, were damaged by drone strikes. This is one of the first of its kind data centre disruption as a direct result of military activities. 

These strikes have resulted in structural damage and power delivery disruption, along with additional water damages as a consequence of fire. Companies and institutions like Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, First Abu Dhabi Bank, ride-hailing platform Careem, among others reported outages. 

The disruption has forced the cloud provider to advise customers to reroute workloads to alternate regions including the United States, Europe and the Asia Pacific, bringing locations such as India into the conversation as enterprises reassess disaster recovery strategies and geographic diversification of their digital infrastructure.

“For customers requiring guidance on alternate regions, we recommend considering AWS Regions in the United States, Europe, or Asia Pacific, as appropriate for your latency and data residency requirements,” the cloud service provider said. 

There are also concerns that data centres are now being seen as strategic targets as the entire playbook of drone warfare and aerial attacks is being handled by AI and big data. As AI systems and models help nations hunt for targets and become “more efficient” in striking their enemies, data centres are just as critical as military bases in a war-like situation. 

Could India Offer Respite?

To be sure, in the Asia Pacific region, India hosts six of the 41 availability zones, and seven of the total 23 edge network locations. AWS, and even Microsoft Azure, may reroute data centre workloads to India and Singapore, Economic Times reported quoting an unnamed person in the know. These hyperscalers are reportedly seeking capacity in sites like Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Kochi for rerouting especially banking-related workloads. 

Experts believe such geopolitical disruptions could reshape how companies choose where to host digital infrastructure. The event reinforces a broader lesson that enterprises should reduce dependence on single-region, single-availability-zone, and highly concentrated deployment models, and focus on strengthening backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity capabilities. 

“In that context, it is reasonable to expect that some incremental infrastructure demand could accrue to markets such as India, particularly given the country’s expanding data center capacity, increasing hyperscaler and colocation activity, strengthening international connectivity, and a strong push by the government,” said Ashish Banerjee, senior principal analyst at Gartner.

To be sure, AWS agreed to invest ₹60,000 Cr in data centres in Telangana in January 2025. “AWS will be expanding its data centres in Hyderabad in a big way with plans for fresh investment of around ₹60,000 Cr. With this AWS  Region in Hyderabad will play an increasingly important role in supporting AWS’s growth of cloud services in India, including AI in the future,” the company had then said. 

While the Middle East has emerged as an important interconnection hub for Asia–Europe workloads in recent years, such events also highlight the importance of diversified regional capacity and stronger resilience planning, said Amit Sarin, managing director, real estate and colocation data centre provider Anant Raj.

“Against this backdrop, India is gradually emerging as a strong alternative. The country has a stable policy environment, good connectivity and a data centre ecosystem that is expanding quickly. For companies looking at regional infrastructure, these factors make India a practical option for hosting and distributing workloads,” he added. 

Data Centres As Strategic Infrastructure

Notably, Iran’s armed forces launched the strike on the AWS facilities to potentially identify the role of these centres in supporting the military and intelligence activities of the US and Israeli forces, according to Iranian state TV. This first of its kind instance has shown that data centres are now legitimate military targets.

Modern businesses increasingly depend on cloud infrastructure, which is housed in physical servers and storage within data centres. With the growing need for enterprise applications modernisation, AI platforms, and digital infrastructure across sectors, the cloud penetration has increased. 

According to International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Worldwide Software and Public Cloud Services Spending report, spending on public cloud alone is expected to exceed $1Tn in 2026. Among the cloud services providers, the ‘Big Three’ – AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud – command 60% of the market share. 

For many enterprises, the incident became a real-time stress test of disaster recovery planning. Companies operating in affected regions are now evaluating alternate infrastructure routes to maintain uptime for critical applications, financial systems, and customer-facing platforms. 

IT industry body Nasscom said in its advisory note on strengthening operational and cyber resilience amid evolving Middle East situation on March 9, said that firms are evaluating alternate infrastructure routing to ensure cloud and data centre resilience and safeguard critical systems.

However, Gartner’s Banerjee cautioned that any shift in the geographical focus of data centre giants will likely be selective rather than large-scale. Enterprises must still balance resiliency benefits against data sovereignty rules, application dependencies, available capacity, and the complexity of migrating mission-critical workloads.

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