Two million jobs will be created by cloud computing: Survey

With an increasing number of companies adopting cloud computing, over two million jobs are expected to be created in India by 2015, a study commissioned by software giant Microsoft said.

The cloud technology is also projected to generate nearly 14 million new jobs worldwide in the same time, the study conducted by research firm IDC for Microsoft said.

Cloud computing, which is Internet-based, facilitates sharing of technological resources, software and digital information. This emerging field functions on a pay-per-use model, helping technology companies to bring down cost.

“A common misperception is cloud computing is a job eliminator, but in truth it will be a job creator — a major one,” Chief Research Officer and Senior Vice President John F Gantz of IDC, which conducted the study, said.

Job growth will occur across continents and throughout organisations of all sizes because emerging markets, small cities and small businesses have the same access to cloud benefits as large enterprises or developed nations, he added.

IDC estimated that in 2011, IT cloud services helped businesses around the world generate more than US$600 billion in revenue and 1.5 million new jobs. According to the study, more than 50 per cent of the 14 million jobs would be generated in the small and medium businesses.

Further, more than two million jobs each will be generated in the ‘communications and media’ and manufacturing sectors, followed by banking at over 1.4 million.

Saying that cloud computing posed a compelling opportunity for businesses and governments around the world, the study said India is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this opportunity.

“India is uniquely poised to leverage this opportunity with factors like an unparallelled ecosystem of developers, Independent Software Vendors and System Integrators, no legacy IT systems and a high growth rate of economy contributing towards growth of cloud computing,” Microsoft India GM Business and Marketing Floris van Heist said.

The study also estimates revenues from cloud innovation to reach US$1.1 trillion per year by 2015. Combined with cloud efficiencies, this will drive significant organisational reinvestment and job growth, it said. The study also indicated that countries investing in key cloud infrastructure will experience greater job growth.

The factors determining the number of jobs that might be created in a particular country include projected level of spending on IT, degree of automation, workforce size, amongst others.

Microsoft offers services across all three service layers of the cloud -- infrastructure, platform and software as services.