Indian government grants Microsoft cloud a rare provisional accreditation

India is becoming a hotly contested region for international companies seeking to place a stake in the technological growth of the area. While India has long since developed a thriving technological community of engineers, developers, services and businesses, its blooming potential of billions of ‘new’ customers and users that have outside companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft heavily investing in the region.

With that being said, the Indian government has been very careful about how and what outside technologies it approves of for its citizens, to foster a greater national investment in its businesses and communities.

However, despite the stringent curation of outside influences in the India market, Microsoft has managed to obtain a rare provisional accreditation from The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in India.

According to Alice Rison, a senior director of the Microsoft Azure division, with this newly achieved accreditation, “Microsoft can now deliver a cloud computing solution in India that provides truly innovative digital services to a wider range of customers.”

As cloud solution providers look to get their mitts into what most in the tech community believes is the next billion-user economy, Microsoft may find itself uniquely positioned to become an immovable commodity within India’s government and business sectors with its new accreditation.

With this new accreditation, Microsoft can now do more to support the Government of India in its journey to provide transformational e-governance services, financial inclusion opportunities, quality healthcare, and education to billions of people in the country.

With the new accreditation, it seems Microsoft is looking past competing in the zero-margin smartphone wars in the area or battling to be the inexpensive Internet solution, to becoming the secure and trusted cloud backbone to all connected people and devices in India.

A wide goal, but if successful could potential cement Microsoft’s presence India, which is something the company’s ‘mobile first, cloud first’ CEO Satya Nadella has been hoping to achieve for some time now.