IBM has launched its ‘Cloud Satellite’ initiative in India to enable the next frontier of distributed cloud computing.

The tech giant has also been empanelled by the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeiTY), as a cloud service provider. What this means is Indian public sector companies can now access the industry’s most secure and open cloud platform to drive transformation/innovation and growth.

In a note Sandip Patel, Managing Director, IBM India said: that this is a key milestone for IBM Cloud – one that reiterates its commitment to supporting the Government’s vision of Digital India. “The empanelment will enable the Indian public sector – government agencies at the central and state level, and public sector undertakings across sectors, to tap into the industry’s most secure and open cloud platform to drive innovation and growth.”

The development also is significant for IBM, considering the fact that many organisations seek some sort of reassurance that a private service provider has the Indian government’s backing.

He further added that after the uncertainty of the past year, CEO’s focus on organisational agility – the capability of an organization to respond quickly and pivot without losing momentum – emerged as a top priority.

“Technology not only enables this agility — it is central to enabling a hybrid workforce, driving operational efficiency, ensuring resilience, and enhancing customer engagement. On this, the hybrid cloud delivers. In fact, clients find that choosing a hybrid cloud approach is 2.5 times more valuable than relying on the public cloud alone.”

The benefits are across many areas – from business value acceleration and infrastructure cost efficiency to developer productivity and cost of regulatory, compliance and security. “In fact, only a hybrid cloud architecture can provide a consistent, standards-based approach to development, security, and operations that’s required for digital innovation that has become the most powerful way to drive transformation and change in today’s time,” he said.

Earlier, IBM had announced a significant investment in its hybrid cloud strategy, with the launch of IBM Cloud Satellite – a unifying layer of cloud services, available across all locations, to offer businesses high levels of control over critical data delivered via IBM Cloud, regardless of where their data resides. Clients can now deploy cloud services securely –and in any environment –in any public cloud, private cloud, on-premises, or at the edge.

For example, IBM Cloud Satellite will include support for Satellite locations on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. IBM Cloud Satellite extends secure and open IBM Cloud services to any environment where data is being collected, processed, or shared thereby giving clients across multiple industries–especially those in highly regulated industries such as telco, financial services, healthcare, and government the flexibility and efficiency of cloud in a secure manner.

IBM India, over the years

Over the years, IBM has lent its weight for many of the country’s tech-powered transformation journeys. From IBM infrastructure being underlying architecture for eleven out of the thirteen public sector banks to our collaboration with Ministry of Education (MoE) and Niti Aayog on samShiksha; from Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture supporting farmers in Karnataka; to STEM programs across 10 states in India and AI curriculum in 160 CBSE schools accessed by over 12,000 students – IBM has been at the forefront of driving innovation and impact – made in India, for India and the World.

“The launch of IBM Cloud Satellite and IBM Cloud accreditation enables us to further strengthen our collaboration with organizations and the government/public sector to bring the power of exponential technologies like Cloud & AI to further the next big technology evolution in India,” said Patel.