India is expanding possibilities through Cloud – Companies to look for

Oh, how times have changed! It wasn’t far into the past when we used to think about clouds as fluffy, dreamy, white, mysterious floating objects, now days Cloud is majorly used for online IT Infrastructure. I think the drastic change is justified, as Cloud Computing has changed the way the IT field functions. It is a crucial cog in changing IT-as-a-product to IT-as-a-Service. The product-centric model is now a service-centric model, making it global, distributed, and omnipresent.

Embracing the Cloud

While many were skeptical of how well we can utilize this technological advancement, IT firms, applications, and services are moving swiftly towards embracing the cloud. But was the skepticism wrong? Well, how could it be? Cloud computing involves processing all the personal, private, sensitive data that can turn the tides of any company, in places that are far away, typically offshore, and owned by someone else. Also, the fact that our services are dependent upon a 3rd party service provider is another factor to causes skepticism. But despite all these and many more disadvantages, Cloud computing has grown at a CAGR of 23% from 2014 to 2020, into a 4 Billion Dollar Industry just in India and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 15% for the next 4 years.

What could be those advantages, that really offset such drawbacks and not just offsetting but in fact driving the industry towards CAGR growth of 15%? 

For this, let’s understand Cloud computing, it is essentially using systems for computing, storing, gaining, and providing(to customers) easy access over the internet, without having to physically own, maintain or service those systems. Though the term ‘Cloud computing’ might sound new to many, it is something that is embedded deeply in our day-to-day life, WhatsApp, Instagram, Gmail, all of these are based on the model of cloud computing.

Now we know the basics of Cloud Computing and that it is used by a lot of companies, but what is it that sets cloud computing apart from all of the latest technologies around us? It is the myriad of advantages it gives. Let’s start off with the basic skepticism we all have, how can our data be more secure in an offshore server than the server right beside us, that too taken care of by us? Well, the answer is cloud computing hosts take security way too seriously and are better equipped with dealing with cyber attacks and also well trained in safeguarding data. A survey by Rapidscale says that 94% of businesses saw an improvement in security after switching to Cloud. Other than just security, Cloud also provides Disaster Recovery, Insights, analytics, and the list goes on and on.

Now, we understand that it provides us a lot of benefits, protects our data, but if it is providing us so much, then it has to be expensive, right? Yes, Indeed setting up cloud-based servers does cost an organization a lot, to solve this cloud companies are coming up with pay-as-you-go systems, flexible demand-based services. Some of the cloud customers even reported cost savings upon using the cloud. 

Cloud computing in India

COVID-19, a word we’re going to dread for a long time to come, has changed many things in and around us. Businesses no matter how big they are got impacted immensely by the pandemic. Especially Indian enterprises. In the words of the Research vice president at Gartner, “Indian enterprises were not ready for large scale of remote work.” But, work can’t be stopped, bread has to reach the table, This is when Cloud Computing has stepped up, enabling large masses of people to work from their homes. Cloud has ushered into a new era after the pandemic, the cloud 2.0 era, with an expected growth rate of 29.4%, spending on Cloud in India is going to reach $4.1 Billion, an 8% share in total IT spending in India.  

As India progresses further in the road of digitalization, the public cloud is going to be the must-have technology. India being a price-sensitive market, will be looking at the cloud for technological up-gradation, as it provides a low-cost entry. 

Currently, Indian enterprises are still in nascent stages of cloud adoption as compared to their peers from developed nations. And the CIOs of Indian enterprises have understood that building resilience, minimizing disruption, is a must and could be achieved through the cloud. Thus, having understood the importance of cloud technologies will be implementing cloud at a rapid pace in India, and with a second wave expediting the whole process. Cloud acts as the backbone of the digital transformation that companies are going to go through, and in the near future we will be witnessing not just one but multi-cloud implementation by Indian Enterprises, a study says that by the next two years 30% of Indian enterprises will be using various tools and solutions to manage their multi-cloud strategies. 

Below is a snapshot of what the spending and growth of cloud in India is going to look like this year, Indian government is playing a pivotal role in supporting this growth, by creating a positive investment climate, and interest in technological vendors.

The cloud computing-as-a-service (CCaaS) market in India is expected to grow at a rate of CAGR of 15% till 2023 and the steam is expected to remain solid. As told above, the cloud is going to be the foundation and backbone for many services and applications online and thus the revenue coming from infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is going to be more than $1.2 Billion by 2024, that is a CAGR of 16.3%, IaaS is currently the smallest of the segments discussed above with only 12% share.

Indian companies are embracing the cloud infrastructure too!

Now, that we’ve understood how the growth of cloud computing is going to be for the next couple of years, a new question arises, who exactly will assist enterprises to leverage the benefits of cloud computing? Well, there is a large spectrum of companies helping enterprises to take their systems to the cloud, I’ll be talking about a couple of big organizations and a couple of lesser-known ones. Firstly, I’ll talk about an organization close to my heart, Tata Consultancy Services.

TCS Cloud solutions are for those companies looking to reduce the costs of their IT systems while wanting flexibility, scalability, and agility. TCSs’ Cloud solutions and services arm provide Cloud consulting services, that check the cloud compatibility, architecture, design along with migration support and compliance, security management. Other than consulting, TCS provides Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Platform services (PaaS), Application services (SaaS), etc. 

Along with TCS, Infosys is another big shot company, that is providing cloud services, Infosys offers Integration-as-a-service, for hybrid cloud integration projects. They can integrate SaaS, PaaS, and can also enhance the capability of already existing hybrid cloud ecosystems with API layers for enterprises. Infosys boasts of reducing the cost of operations by 30% and accelerating transition by 40%. 

CtrlS, a pioneer in cloud computing in India, boasts of being Asia’s largest data center, provides an uptime of 99.995% of their services, and offers their customers over 140 types of Operating System software with all types of hardware requirements, for a smooth plug and play operation. 

Adani group of enterprises themselves are looking to enter this lucrative field, by purchasing 34,375 Sq.Meters of land in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India. As always a healthy competition does greater good for everyone, only time will tell us how butter smooth our life is going to get with such advanced technologies being embraced in India.