India public cloud service market to be worth $13 bn by 2026: Report

BFSI and manufacturing among leaders in public cloud adoption, as demand grows from other sectors

The Indian public cloud service market will be worth $13 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 23.1 per cent for 2021-26, according to an international research firm.

Public cloud service (PCS) makes computing and storage applications available on demand to organisations and individuals over the public internet. A private cloud model’s resources are available only to a single organisation.

International Data Corporation (IDC) said in a report on Monday the revenue of Indian PCS market, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, and software-as-a-service (SaaS), totalled $2.8 billion for the first half of 2022.

SaaS was the largest component of the Indian PCS market, followed by IaaS and PaaS during the first half of 2022, said the report called IDC Worldwide Semi-annual Public Cloud Services Tracker, H12022 (January-June).

Businesses around the world are looking to improve their digital operations to improve customer experience and rise above competition, said Praval Singh, vice president, marketing & customer experience, Zoho Corporation, which makes computer software and web-based business tools.

“This has led to an increase in the demand for SaaS and PaaS services as they’re scalable, secure, and often have the flexibility to interoperate with legacy on-premise and on-cloud services,” he said.

The report said cloud service providers are expanding in India by putting up new data centres/cloud regions. Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) and manufacturing are among leaders in public cloud adoption, as demand grows from other sectors like state-owned companies, media and gaming

“This growth has amassed the demand for cloud experts and created high-paying job opportunities, and businesses using the cloud can re-provision technological resources without having to stretch their costs,” said Bhavesh Goswami, chief executive officer of CloudThat.

Rajiv Ranjan, associate research director, cloud and artificial intelligence at IDC, said Indian organisations are increasing investments in machine learning, blockchain, and internet of things (IoT) to improve customer experience and business efficiency.