Cloud & Indian businesses: Foreign companies want in

As the pandemic brings the realisation of the benefits of cloud, such as low operational costs, modernised offers to customers and faster growth, cloud services are becoming critical in the scheme of things. And everyone is eyeing India’s cloud market as a potential high return on investment (ROI) sector.

According to a recent report by Gartner, Inc, end-user spending on public cloud services in India will touch $7.3 billion in 2022, up from 2021 by 29.6 per cent. The cloud service model is projected to add up to $2.4 billion in 2022, rising 40 per cent from 2021. And Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) will constitute 32.3 per cent of overall investments in public cloud services in 2022.

“We see the Indian market as one of the most vibrant. It's an incredibly massive market opportunity for a lot of different vendors to tap into,” says Aleksander Cvetkovski, global director, GTM and Acceleration Services at CloudBlue, an independent Ingram Micro business that helps service providers build, scale and monetise cloud and digital services in the as-a-service economy. The 

California-based CloudBlue is exploring the Indian market for more partnerships with the country’s vast number of small and medium businesses (SMBs).

The pandemic was a tipping point for Indian businesses to realise the importance of the public cloud, says Prasanna Anireddy, senior director at Progress, a 40-year-old US listed IT company that is expanding its business in India and is also actively hiring DevOps (software development and IT operations) engineers from here for global business.

“The adoption of cloud will further evolve from serving new use cases that combine cloud with technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), the Internet of Things, ultra-fast networks like 5G, Wi-Fi 6E and more,” Anireddy says.

“We are in an era of interconnectedness. Hybrid is the way forward, which includes the cloud, the work environments, the portfolio, and ecosystems,” adds Rishu Sharma, associate research director, Cloud & AI, International Data Corporation (IDC), a global provider of market intelligence and advisory services for the IT, telecom and consumer technology markets.

IDC’s research shows accelerated adoption across verticals driven by needs of collaboration, flexibility, and scalability. Organisations in industries like banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) and manufacturing are at the forefront of this cloud spend. Other industries like education, healthcare and media are also witnessing accelerated cloud adoption driven by varied use cases like online education, virtual diagnosis, online entertainment, to name a few.

With cloud technology seeing a huge spike post-pandemic, CloudBlue alone witnessed a 270 per cent growth in solutions like MDM (mobile device management), which are important for working from home and securing devices. Apart from such growth, Cvetkovski says that the end customers are getting much more educated on what they need and what they want, although India is still an immature market and a late bloomer when it comes to cloud.

This now forces cloud service providers to take emerging markets like India more seriously. They have to be much more strategic in the type of portfolio they offer. “Today, it's very difficult to just say, ‘I have these 50 services, you can choose whichever you want’,” Cvetkovski adds.

While the market potential is immense, organisations in India currently face certain challenges while transitioning to cloud. Migrating critical application and business processes to the cloud requires careful planning and deliberation, says Anireddy.

“Identifying the right migration strategy, ensuring data security and compliance, avoiding vendor lock-in, adopting tools and practices that support cloud operations — these are various factors that need to be planned and will influence the cost of migration,” she says.

For instance, the lift-and-shift model, application modernisation and refactoring, as well as re-platforming are all popular methods of cloud migration. Each one of them has its place in the migration strategy. “Enterprises face varied challenges ranging from holdbacks of legacy systems, readiness of processes alongside cloud skills gap, among others,” says Sharma.

Companies like CloudBlue see opportunities in areas like cybersecurity, for instance. “Within that, I think there's opportunities in iOS for Azure, for Google, and for AWS (Amazon Web Services),” Cvetkovski says.

“There are many SMBs in India that need solutions. In the mid-size business range, India needs solutions for productivity and operational support as well as for making that tedious job you do on a day-to-day basis a little bit easier,” he explains.

When it comes to enterprises, whether in India or anywhere else, the needs are similar, he adds.

So, what does the future hold for cloud in India? Revenues in businesses are predicted to pour in. According to an IDC report, by 2023, because of enterprises struggling with app modernisation and data integration across cloud silos, 20 per cent will adopt connected cloud strategies to overcome these concerns.

“To gain business agility, enterprises will commit to modernising over half of their existing applications by 2025, through use of turnkey cloud-native development and deployment services,” says Sharma.

She expects that by 2024, over 50 per cent of enterprises will replace outdated operational models with cloud-centric models that facilitate rather than inhibit organisational collaboration, resulting in better business outcomes.

In the past two years, cloud computing exploded as businesses went virtual and services were predominantly delivered via digital channels. The companies looking towards India expect a continuation of this in 2022.

“Businesses will focus more on security, compliance and look to support hybrid and multiple cloud environments,” says Sharma. “With large cloud providers offering hybrid cloud options, enterprises will consider migration of more services to the cloud that have stringent data privacy and compliance needs.”

Cloud’s nature is to be constantly updated, maintained and available, which evicts the fears of the challenges for a business — including the kind posed by the pandemic.

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(The writer is Editor of The Tech Panda)