Indian public cloud services market to grow at a CAGR of 21.5% for 2020-25: IDC

The Indian public cloud services (PCS) market, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, and software-as-a-service (SaaS), revenue totaled USD 3.6 Billion for 2020, according to IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker. For the second half of 2020 (Jul-Dec), the Indian public cloud services market totaled USD 1.9 billion. The overall Indian public cloud services market is expected to reach USD 9.5 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 21.5% for 2020-25.

"Public clouds played a critical role for organizations in 2020, driven by business continuity, flexibility, and agility. The coming times will see enterprise objectives directed towards digital resiliency, and cloud will be the foundation to it all. Cloud will become crucial as organizations expedite the development process and deployment of business applications to meet the changing work and business environment," Rishu Sharma, Principal Analyst, Cloud and Artificial Intelligence, IDC India.

SaaS continued to be the largest component of the overall public cloud services market, followed by IaaS and PaaS in 2020. The spending continues to accelerate, with the top two service providers holding 49% of the Indian public cloud services market for 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic continued to be the key driver of cloud adoption as enterprises continued their investments in cloud infrastructure, platforms, and software to improve the resiliency of their business operations and equip themselves to tackle successive waves of the pandemic. As business objectives aim at gaining resiliency, IDC expects cloud adoption to be further accelerated for rapid digital innovation.

"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. Businesses started adopting cloud to host a wide array of applications ranging from email servers to many complex systems like data warehousing, advanced analytics, etc. There was also an increased migration of enterprise applications to the cloud. Moreover, the remote working induced by the pandemic propelled the demand for remote storage capabilities and also resulted in increased adoption of cloud-based collaboration tools, VDI applications, etc.," says Harish Krishnakumar, Senior Market Analyst, IDC India.