The Cloud Can’t Survive the Heat Alone
In theory, cloud computing is always on. In reality, especially in India’s summer it’s at risk of shutting down.
In 2024, about 19% of data center outages were caused by cooling failures, with power issues still leading the list.
Power grids buckled. Cooling systems faltered. And startups — especially those reliant on a single-zone public cloud found themselves suddenly vulnerable.
Welcome to the new normal, where climate volatility is a tech problem. And the answer isn’t more cloud. It's a smarter cloud - hybrid cloud.
The Climate Is Cracking the Cloud Illusion
For years, India’s digital economy leaned heavily on public cloud providers - AWS, Azure, GCP with the idea that offloading infra meant offloading risk.
But 2025 changed that.
• Delhi NCR and Hyderabad — two major data hub zones saw rolling brownouts and cooling system failures due to unprecedented heatwaves.
• India introduced time-of-day tariffs in April 2025, raising peak-hour rates by up to ~20% for commercial/industrial consumers.
• Single-point public cloud deployments began showing cracks, especially for platforms that promised 99.99% uptime.
Meanwhile, the demand for always-available platforms, fintech, ecommerce, healthcare, education only keeps rising.
So what are Indian businesses doing?
They’re not ditching the cloud. They’re rebalancing it.
Hybrid Cloud: From Optional to Inevitable
Hybrid cloud, a blend of on-premise or edge-local servers + public cloud capacity isn’t new. But in 2025, it’s evolving from a “nice-to-have” to a business continuity necessity.
Why Hybrid Cloud Makes Sense Now:
Climate Resilience
With public cloud zones exposed to weather disruptions, local edge deployments act as failover buffers during regional outages.
Cost Management
Businesses now route latency-critical, low-volume tasks to edge locations, while offloading compute-heavy but less time-sensitive workloads to public cloud — keeping power costs manageable.
Data Sovereignty & Compliance
Fintechs, health-techs, and edtechs prefer keeping customer data locally (on their infra or via co-location) while still tapping the elasticity of public cloud.
Faster Recovery
Hybrid setups allow for geo-distributed fallback, which means even if a public cloud availability zone falters due to heat or grid issues, local operations don’t pause.
Our Take: The Infrastructure India Needs Isn’t Just Fast. It’s Climate-Aware.
At Lytus, we don’t just observe these shifts, we’re rethinking what the last mile needs to look like when the climate itself becomes a variable.
Here’s what we believe hybrid readiness demands from network providers like us:
1. Low-Latency Support for Edge Fallback
In hybrid systems, latency-sensitive workloads fail over to edge servers when cloud regions are impacted. For this to work seamlessly, last-mile ISPs must ensure:
• <50ms latency to local edge infra
• Stable upload/download sync between local servers and cloud storage
• Seamless switching via SD-WAN or smart routing protocols
2. Uptime-Proof Co-location and Edge POPs
Co-location isn’t just for tech giants anymore. We’re seeing rising demand from:
• Fintechs running customer dashboards and KYC systems
• Edtech platforms storing local classroom data
• Healthtech devices syncing records locally before cloud push
We believe there’s a strong case for:
• Regional edge facilities with UPS + cooling guarantees
• Tiered leasing for racks and micro-servers
• SLA-backed redundancy plans, especially during climate spikes
3. Smart Routing: Heat-Aware, Power-Aware Networks
Traffic routing shouldn’t just be geo-smart. It should be climate-smart — factoring in regional instability, grid strain, and latency drops.
We’re actively exploring routing models that shift data paths away from high-risk zones during peak summer months, optimizing for resilience, not just speed.
4. Hybrid-as-a-Service Partnerships
Many mid-size businesses want hybrid, but don’t have in-house infra teams. We see a future where we bundle edge compute + connectivity + basic failover logic for sectors like:
• Fintech
• Ecommerce
• Creator platforms
• Rural edtech delivery hubs
Conclusion: Cloud Is Powerful. But It’s Not Weatherproof.
The public cloud gave us scale. Hybrid cloud gives us stability in the face of volatility.
In India’s new climate reality where the heat can knock out servers and outages are a monthly occurrence, continuity isn’t about more power. It’s about distributed, flexible architecture.
Hybrid isn’t just a cloud strategy anymore. It’s a climate resilience plan. It’s an uptime insurance policy. And most importantly, it’s an infrastructure evolution that providers, startups, and users need to embrace together.