The two leading countries are then followed by Australia, UK, Japan, Singapore, Germany and the Netherlands, each of which accounts for 4% to 5% of the total. The research is based on an analysis of the data center footprint of 13 of the world’s major cloud and internet service firms, including the largest operators in IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, search, social networking and e-commerce.

In aggregate the companies now have almost 150 major data center sites.

The report said on average, each of the thirteen firms had eleven data center sites. The companies with the broadest data center footprint are the leading hyperscale cloud providers - AWS, IBM and Microsoft.

Each has 20 or more data center locations with at least one in each of the four regions –North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America. Google, Oracle and Rackspace also have a notably broad data center presence.

The remaining firms tend to have their data centers focused primarily in either the US (Salesforce, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo) or China (Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba), the report said.

John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group said, “the country distribution of major data centers clearly reflects two things – the US dominance of cloud and internet technologies; and the scale and unique characteristics of the Chinese market.”

“The ranking also reflects the relative importance of smaller countries that are often used as regional hubs - Hong Kong, Singapore, Netherlands and Ireland.

Until recently India was an omission from the list but Microsoft has just opened its first major cloud data centers in the country and both AWS and IBM will soon be following suit,” he added.

Telecomasia.net