Airtel Cloud is seeing growing traction, with sovereign cloud emerging as a key opportunity in regulated sectors and PSUs, says Gopal Vittal
Airtel is stepping up investments in its cloud business, with sovereign cloud emerging as one of the biggest opportunities for Airtel Cloud, particularly among regulated industries and public sector organisations.
Speaking during Bharti Airtel’s Q1 FY27 investor call, Gopal Vittal, Executive Vice Chairman, Bharti Airtel, said Airtel Cloud had added 11 customers during the quarter, taking its total customer base to 33. He said most critical services are now live on the platform, while certifications from MeitY and others are expected to strengthen its go-to-market proposition.
Vittal said Airtel Cloud’s success will depend on four factors: talent, capital, go-to-market capabilities and the ability to build solutions aligned with customer requirements. Airtel, he added, is increasing investments to scale the business.
The company has also learnt that cloud migration decisions typically have long gestation periods. Customers moving workloads from on-premise environments, hyperscalers or private clouds face significant integration requirements, while egress costs can become a barrier for those moving away from existing cloud providers.
Airtel has therefore found greater traction in simpler, packaged propositions such as disaster recovery, backup as a service, storage as a service and video surveillance as a service.
The larger opportunity, however, lies in sovereign cloud.
“The one place where the deals are large is the need for sovereign clouds where there are more sensitive workloads. This is largely in the regulated spheres or in the PSU spheres,” Vittal said.
Airtel’s sovereign cloud proposition is built around keeping the data plane, control plane, infrastructure and jurisdiction within India. The company believes this can address growing requirements around data sovereignty, regulatory compliance and operational control, particularly as enterprises reassess their dependence on global cloud providers amid a changing geopolitical environment.
Vittal had previously described sovereignty as a potentially significant opportunity, noting that many companies are increasingly identifying workloads that require sovereign infrastructure.
Launched in August 2025, Airtel Cloud is positioned as an India-hosted and India-controlled cloud platform aimed at sectors with stringent data and regulatory requirements. The platform combines cloud infrastructure with Airtel’s broader capabilities in connectivity, cybersecurity, IoT and managed services.
The company is also positioning the platform around resilience. Airtel Cloud uses geo-redundant infrastructure and offers disaster recovery capabilities including replication, automated failover and failback, and immutable backups.
For Airtel, the challenge now is less about establishing the cloud platform and more about building the commercial and technical muscle required to scale it. Vittal said the business is being incubated separately, with Airtel building a dedicated talent pool while leveraging its existing B2B teams to open customer relationships. Technical sales and solution architecture will increasingly be handled by the cloud team.
The approach reflects Airtel’s attempt to carve out a differentiated position in India’s increasingly competitive cloud market, where sovereignty, regulatory control and integration with connectivity and security could become as important as compute and pricing.