End-user spending on public cloud in India to hit $7.3 billion in 2022: Gartner

“Public cloud services adoption has accelerated since the onset of the global pandemic. The pandemic was a tipping point for Indian businesses to realize the true value of public cloud,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “In India, the policy infrastructure is emerging as an important contributor to public cloud growth.”

The recently launched public cloud government initiatives Meghraj and Cloud Vision for India 2022 will prove useful for small and medium businesses or those who are in early stage of cloud adoption to benefit from this technology, Nag said.

Additionally, initiatives targeted at building a skilled cloud workforce in partnership with private IT service providers will contribute to the government’s effort of strengthening the public cloud ecosystem in the country.

While still on the rise, Indian end-user spending on public cloud next year will be slower than the 34.6% growth forecast in 2021. Indian CIOs are expected to focus their cloud investment on cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS). This segment is forecast to total $2.4 billion in 2022, up 40% from 2021. IaaS will make up 32.3% of the total investments in public cloud services in 2022.

“Public cloud growth continues to be driven by organisations that want to modernise their IT and reduce their capital expenditure spend. The desire for agility and innovation in both business transformation and IT operations is also fuelling the growth of public cloud,” said Nag. “The next step in the growth of cloud in India will be the adoption of cloud native technologies. Indian CIOs will look to reimagine and refashion their applications and workloads using containers and microservices as well as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)”