Customers can choose data centres to route their data, says Zoom

From January to April 2020, Zoom saw 6,700% growth in free user sign-ups in India

Zoom Video Communications Inc, which competes with the collaboration platforms of tech giants such as Microsoft, Google and Reliance’s JioMeet, said that it will expand its presence in India by opening a new technology centre in Bengaluru. The San Jose-based firm will hire key talent over the next few years. This commitment represents a growing strategic investment in the country, where Zoom already has one office in Mumbai (expected to triple in size) and two data centres in Mumbai and Hyderabad. These data centres have grown capacity 3-4 times in the last few months. This growing presence is in direct response to Zoom’s increased level of adoption by users across India. From January to April 2020, Zoom said it had seen a 6,700 per cent growth in free user sign-ups in India.
 

“India is a strategically important country for Zoom and we expect to see continued growth and investment here. We are proud to provide our services for free to over 2,300 educational institutions in India during the Covid-19 pandemic, and look forward to continuing to work with the people and government of India hand-in-hand,” said Eric S. Yuan, CEO of Zoom. “We plan to hire key employees for the technology centre over the next few years, pulling from India’s highly-educated engineering talent pool. This facility will play a critical role in Zoom’s continued growth,” he said.
 

The company declined to reveal the number of people it plans to hire and the amount of capital it plans to invest for its India expansion efforts.
 

The expansion into Bengaluru will supplement Zoom’s existing R&D centres and support Zoom’s engineering leadership, which is based at its San Jose, California headquarters. Zoom said it selected Bengaluru for its exceptional engineering and IT talent. The company will immediately begin recruiting DevOps engineers, IT, security, and business operations headcount in the area. Employees will work from home until remote working stops.
 

“We are thrilled to open a technology centre in Bengaluru, which will be an innovation hub for our communications platform,” said Velchamy Sankarlingam, president of product and engineering for Zoom. “The talent in India is truly exceptional,”  he noted.
 

Experts such as Sagnik Chakraborty, researcher, cybersecurity studies programme at foreign policy think tank Gateway House said the increasing investments in India’s tech ecosystem prove that India is a strategic market for tech companies given the divergent datasets generated. Regarding the security concerns associated with Zoom, Chakraborty said it was important to note that Zoom had initiated a 90-day security plan from April 1 to July 1, where the sole focus of the entire company was shifted to security. “Prominent enhancements amongst these are security controls such as waiting rooms and lock meetings.

Passcodes have been made into a default feature. The beta release of E2EE(End-to-End Encryption) for both free and paid users is planned to be implemented this month,” said Chakraborty.
 

Zoom had been facing allegations of Chinese links amid strained ties between India and China. Aparna Bawa, chief operating officer of Zoom said the company was based in the US, was listed on Nasdaq and its founder was an American citizen.
 

Regarding the questions about Indian user data being routed through China and Chinese servers storing data of users outside of China, Sankarlingam said Zoom had 17 data centres worldwide out of which one was located in China. He said the company did not store the data of users. The only time it was stored was if someone wanted to do the server-side recording.
 

He said the only data going through China was that of enterprises which had users based there, but they had an option whether they wanted the data to go through that country or not.
 

“You can actually choose data centres that you want your data to go through,” said Sankarlingam.
 

Sp[eaking on the Indian government’s advisories related to the company's security, Zoom India head Sameer Raje said that he would like to refer to the May 29 advisory of Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-In), which clearly articulated Zoom 5.0 and the enhanced security and upgraded features. “None of the advisories released before said that Zoom is unsafe to be used. It just pointed out some of the bugs (and) issues reported, but it also spoke about the fix (like) upgrading to the higher version of Zoom,” said Raje.
 

Bawa said the firm had also reached out and engaged with the Indian government and “so far we are optimistic.”  When asked about the resemblance between Zoom and Reliance Jio’s recently launched video conferencing service JioMeet, Bawa said Zoom’s “secret sauce” was not just the UI (user interface), but tremendous architecture on the back end that allowed it to deliver high quality and video and audio even from points all over the globe.
 

“We are no stranger to competition. We've been competing with much larger companies since we've been in existence and we have not only survived, (but also ) thrived, expanded and delivered a very easy to use, a high quality, safe and secure service,” said Bawa.

• Zoom opens tech centre in Bengaluru

• It will supplement Zoom’s existing R&D centers.

• Zoom competes with the collaboration platforms of Microsoft,  Google, JioMeet.

• From January to April 2020, Zoom has seen 6700 per cent growth in free user sign ups in India.

• Provided services for free to over 2,300 educational institutions in India during Covid.

• Zoom said it does not store the data of the Indian users and it does not go through China.