• End-user spending on public cloud to grow 29% in 2021 to $4.1b.
• There is still a long road ahead for Indian enterprises to achieve the same market maturity as the US or Europe.

Indian enterprises are at an early stage of cloud adoption as compared to their global counterparts but Covid-19 has given a shot in the arm to the adoption rate significantly as CIOs migrated from legacy systems to public cloud services to maintain business continuity and resilience through 2020.

“Indian enterprises were not ready for the large scale of remote work. However, public cloud delivered on its promise of scalability, cost efficiency and business resilience for Indian enterprises during this critical time in 2020. The onset of the pandemic was the starting point of the Cloud 2.0 era,” Sid Nag, Research Vice-President at Gartner, said.

As digitalisation efforts further evolve in the country, he said that public cloud will become a must have technology for Indian enterprises.

Moreover, he said that Indian enterprises moved critical business applications such as email, web hosting, customer relationship management , enterprise resource planning  and human resources to the cloud, ensuring employees can access them anytime and from anywhere in the world, as long as they have internet access.

SaaS to have a larger pie

The recent investment by hyperscalers, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and NTT, in India further testify the opportunities for public cloud to grow in this market.

Nag said that the low cost of entry provided by public cloud services will be a big influence on Indian CIOs to increase their spending on this technology in the price sensitive market.

Hence, end-user spending on public cloud services in India is expected to increase 29.4 per cent to $4.1 billion in 2021 compared to $3.2 billion this year.

In 2021, spending on managed services and cloud infrastructure will make up eight per cent of total IT spending in India.

Although the cloud application services (SaaS) segment is forecast to be the largest segment in the public cloud services market in India in 2021, cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS) will experience the largest growth at 44.6 per cent.

 “While end-user spending on cloud in India is increasing, there is a long road ahead for Indian enterprises to achieve the same market maturity as the US or Europe. India-based organisations and their CIOs need to focus on the cultural shift that will make them cloud-ready and give them a competitive edge,” he said.