Bharti Airtel scales up Airtel Cloud, ending the June quarter with 33 enterprise customers after adding 11 new ones in three months.

That growth is backed by real investment. The company built the platform around what it calls a sovereign-by-design architecture.

In simple terms, that means the data, the infrastructure and the control systems behind Airtel Cloud are all hosted, managed and governed within India, nothing routed offshore.

This setup has already earned certification from India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, a credential Airtel is using to win over enterprise and government clients who need their data to stay local.

Speaking on a recent earnings call, executive vice-chairman Gopal Vittal said scaling this business comes down to four things: the right people, capital, strong go-to-market execution and solutions that actually match what customers need.

He said Airtel is stepping up investment across all four. The platform itself runs on Airtel’s own data centres and network, offering infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, advanced connectivity and GenAI-based provisioning.

It was originally built to handle Airtel’s internal operations, processing up to 140 crore transactions a minute, before the company opened it up to outside businesses last year.

Cloud sits inside Airtel Business, the unit that also houses cybersecurity, IoT and CPaaS offerings.

That broader Airtel Business arm brought in about Rs 5,665 crore in revenue during the June quarter, a slice of Airtel India’s overall Rs 41,214 crore.

Vittal was candid about the friction too. Moving a company’s workloads off on-premise servers or another cloud provider takes time, and customers already parked elsewhere often face steep egress costs just to leave.

Even so, he pointed to early wins in disaster recovery, backup, storage and video surveillance services, with bigger sovereign cloud deals now taking shape in regulated industries and the public sector.

Airtel is also building out a dedicated cloud talent team to support the push.

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