Indian firms to be using at least 10 cloud platforms by 2023

• Enterprises plan to increase share of spend on hybrid from 42% to 49% by 2023.
• Though 90% of companies globally were “on the cloud” by 2019, only about 20% of their workloads have moved to a cloud environment.
• Majority of cloud budgets are being allocated to hybrid cloud platforms amid public cloud spending is set to reduce from 50% share to 43% by 2023.

Bengaluru: Organisations in India are expected to be using at least 10 clouds from a growing number of vendors by 2023 but only 29 per cent of businesses have a holistic multi-cloud management strategy, IBM survey revealed.

Business executives in India are increasingly planning to invest in hybrid multi-cloud platforms by 2023 to drive business transformation and to unlock value.

According to the survey respondents, 17 per cent of their IT spend is allocated to cloud at present and they plan to increase the share of spend on hybrid from 42 per cent to 49 per cent by 2023.

The majority of their cloud budgets are being allocated to hybrid cloud platforms even as their public cloud spend is set to reduce from 50 per cent share today to 43 per cent by 2023.

Most industries will exhibit growth in the number of clouds they will deploy, which can go up to 10 clouds particularly in insurance, telecommunications and retail as these industries will continue to expand multiple cloud deployments in the next three years.

Viswanath Ramaswamy, Vice-President for Cloud and Cognitive Software and Services at IBM India/South Asia, said the adoption of cloud has been a central feature in developing new, digitally-driven business models.

“Interestingly, the findings show that hybrid multi-cloud is the fundamental enabler of an organisation’s operating model, helping them to embark on a journey to become a cognitive enterprise of the future,” he said.

Moreover, he said that hybrid cloud enables improved business performance and greater RoI and this is proven in the instance of leading businesses that have successfully achieved demonstrable competitive advantage through robust hybrid cloud management and governance platform.

Advantage hybrid cloud

The survey revealed that the value derived from hybrid, multi-cloud platform technology and operating model at scale is 2.5 times the value derived from a single platform, single cloud vendor.

In India, leading businesses such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea are achieving business transformation by leveraging hybrid multi-cloud platform technology and embedding AI.

“We are betting big on hybrid cloud which is secure, interoperable, open and free from vendor lock-in,” Ramaswamy said.

The survey was conducted from February to April 2020 by the IBM Institute for Business Value in collaboration with Oxford Economics and covered 6,000 executives globally including 412 executives from India, across industries, job titles and geographies.

Globally, 64 per cent of advanced cloud companies recognise the need for enterprise transformation and application modernisation to go hand-in-hand, 2.6 times higher than the respondents from India.

“Thirty-five per cent of global IT executives—and thirty-one per cent of India IT executives— said they are seeking this type of improved visibility and control of their cloud costs,” survey showed.

The survey showed that only 46 per cent of Indian organisations have cloud infrastructure based on open source technologies and only 37 per cent have a cloud infrastructure that enables multivendor portability without lock-in.

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