Public cloud revenue in India likely to grow 24% this year: Gartner

Public cloud services revenue in India is projected to total $2.4 billion in 2019, an increase of 24.3 per cent from 2018, according to Gartner.
 
India ranks among the nine countries whose growth rate will be higher than the global average growth rate (16 per cent).
 
India is also on track to record the third-highest growth rate in 2019 after China (33 per cent) and Indonesia (29 per cent), taking into consideration that its (India’s) revenue base is much smaller than the mature markets.
 

“The shift from the ‘cloud first’ to the ‘cloud only’ model is pushing organisations in India to increase their spending on public cloud services to advance their digital business initiatives,” said Sid Nag, research vice-president at Gartner.

 
Although India’s revenue will represent only 1.2 per cent of the global public cloud services in 2019, the growth will largely be driven by investments of enterprises in increasing data analytics.

While all the top Indian large-cap and mid-cap IT providers currently have partnerships with the top public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, analysts have noted that a few companies or partnerships offer a differentiated offering right now. However, the market will mature further.
 
Cloud application services or software as a service (SaaS) will be the fastest-growing market segment in India in 2019, accounting for nearly half of the total public cloud services revenue year over year. SaaS revenue is estimated to grow 23 per cent in 2019 to $1.15 billion. It is followed by a cloud system infrastructure services (Iaas) spending, which is estimated to grow 22 per cent in 2019.

 
Among the high profile M&As in this space include Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau in a $15 billion deal, Google’s acquisition of Looker and Pegasystem’s acquisition of Infruid Labs. The growth of SaaS spending is fuelled by increased end-user spending on customer relationship management (CRM), as organisations in India move away from commercial off-the-shelf and licence-based on-premises software to a subscription-based SaaS model to gain agility, innovation and cost efficiency.
 
CRM growth is also driven by the need for businesses to utilise their customer data to drive sales based on past behavior and an increasing access to online presence of Indian consumers.

Consequently, the move to cloud is also prompting an increase in targeted cyber attacks on Indian organisations. Gartner analysts recommend the use a mix of native and third-party controls. Furthermore, they should use technologies such as web application firewalls (WAFs), cloud access security brokers (CASBs), cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs) and microsegmentation platforms like go-to options to secure cloud in their organisations.