'Cloud' tops India Inc investment plan

The “Cloud” now means big money. A significant 39 per cent of enterprises in India have ranked cloud-based services as their No.1 investment priority in India, according to a new study by market research and advisory firm Current Analysis.

IT service providers are preferred deployment partners but large pockets of opportunities also exist for public cloud providers, consulting majors and telecom network operators, the firm said in a new study released on Thursday.

“The Cloud has emerged as a leading investment priority for Indian enterprises, surpassing even network security investments. However, this certainly doesn’t amount to the ICT decision makers lowering their guards when it comes to the all-vital area of IT security. It is just that they have gotten comfortable with the private clouds set up by their longstanding IT service partners like TCS, IBM, HP, Wipro and Tech Mahindra, among others,” said Deepak Kumar, Principal Analyst, APAC, Current Analysis.

A significant 68 per cent of enterprises in India, with 100-plus employees, are using cloud-based services, while the remaining 32 per cent plan to do so over the next 24 months. This is in line with trends in the larger Asia Pacific market where the adoption of cloud-based services is as high as 65 per cent, the firm said, as part of a study that spanned in 19 countries across four key regions globally. “India is fast emerging as a high-growth market for cloud services, led thus far by the private cloud segment.

 However, there is huge potential for adoption of public cloud services, which are in their early stages of market development and would need greater thrust from players such as IBM SoftLayer, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google, NTT Communications and Rackspace, to win enterprise trust and confidence for moving their workloads on the public Cloud,” said Harish Taori, Research Director for the Asia Pacific region at Current Analysis. The study also found that the scale of cloud services adoption easily surpasses those of other new-generation ICT services including Big Data and Enterprise Mobility. 

While 39 per cent of the respondents to the study prefer to invest in cloud-based services, 16 per cent prefer investments in Big Data while 12 per cent favour enterprise mobility. Network security jointly ranked as no.2 investment priority, along with Big Data.