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India’s public cloud spending on a roll
Software as a service made up the lion’s share of overall public cloud spending in India last year, followed by cloud-based infrastructure and platforms as organisations look to build digital agility amid the pandemic
India’s spending on public cloud services in reached $3.6bn in 2020, as more businesses in the subcontinent turn to cloud computing to ride out the ongoing pandemic, according to IDC.
Much of the growth came in the second half of the year, where revenue from cloud-based infrastructure, platform and applications totalled $1.9bn. The overall Indian public cloud services market is expected to reach $9.5bn by 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate of 21.5%.
Rishu Sharma, principal analyst for cloud and artificial intelligence at IDC India, noted the critical role that public cloud services played for organisations in 2020 as enterprises look to build digital resiliency.
“Cloud will become crucial as organisations expedite the development process and deployment of business applications to meet the changing work and business environment,” she added.
Cloud-based applications made up the lion’s share of overall public cloud spending, followed by cloud-based infrastructure and platforms. According to IDC, the top two service providers had 49% of the Indian public cloud services market in 2020.
“Even though enterprises in the country have been discussing cloud adoption for the past few years, the Covid-19 pandemic forced enterprises to expedite their cloud strategy. This accelerated cloud adoption in the country by several years,” said Harish Krishnakumar, senior market analyst at IDC India.
“Businesses started adopting cloud to host a wide array of applications ranging from e-mail servers to many complex systems like data warehousing and advanced analytics. There was also an increased migration of enterprise applications to the cloud,” he added.
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Indian organisations are already using public cloud services in a big way. Tata Capital, for example, is using virtual assistants such as Amazon Alexa to deliver services, while the National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange has migrated 50 applications to AWS after a fire in 2018.
India’s growing demand for public cloud services has drawn major cloud suppliers to shore up their investments in the country.
In November 2020, Amazon Web Services said it was investing $2.8bn in a second cloud region in India, while Microsoft has teamed up with Indian telecoms giant Jio to deliver cloud infrastructure services through two new datacentres being built in Gujarat and Maharashtra.
Not to be outdone is Google which will open a Delhi cloud region by 2021, its second one in India since it launched its Mumbai cloud region in 2017.
Google said the new region will enable Indian organisations to take advantage of its big data and infrastructure services onshore while complying with India’s data laws and regulations.
