‘We don’t use AWS or Azure’: Sridhar Vembu clears air on Arattai, Zoho’s desi tech backbone

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu took to X to dismantle a wave of misinformation swirling around the company’s messaging app Arattai, its data practices, and global operations—reasserting Zoho’s identity as a truly Indian tech company.

“There is a lot of false information we want to correct,” Vembu began, before laying out point-by-point how Zoho and Arattai are built and where user data resides.

The most striking revelation: Arattai doesn’t run on AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. Instead, all services operate on Zoho’s own hardware and software stack, built on top of open-source frameworks like Linux and Postgres. 

While some public cloud services are used to speed up regional traffic through switching nodes, Vembu clarified that no user data is stored on them.

This distinction is key amid rising concerns over digital sovereignty and cloud dependency in India’s tech ecosystem.

Vembu reiterated that Zoho’s entire suite of products, including Arattai, is developed in India, with the company’s global headquarters in Chennai. Zoho pays taxes in India on its global income, despite a significant presence in the US and offices in over 80 countries.

Indian user data, he said, is hosted strictly within India—across data centers in Mumbai, Delhi, and Chennai, with a new one coming up in Odisha. “We are committed to hosting each country’s data in their own jurisdiction,” he wrote.

Addressing confusion around Zoho’s App Store listings, Vembu explained that the developer account still shows a US address because it was set up in the early days by a US-based employee testing the platforms. “We never changed that,” he noted, dismissing it as an irrelevant technicality.

Vembu’s post was both clarification and reaffirmation of Zoho’s long-standing philosophy: owning its entire tech stack and scaling globally without compromising on control or sovereignty.

“We are proudly ‘Made in India, Made for the World’—and we mean it,” he signed off.