India To Witness Third-highest Growth Rate In Global Public Cloud Market In 2019: Gartner

The public cloud services market in India will grow to total $2.4 billion in 2019, up 24.3% from 2018, according to Gartner. Despite holding only 1.2% of the global public cloud services total in 2019, India stands among the top nine countries that are projected to witness higher growth than the global average growth rate (16%). Further, India’s growth rate in public cloud services market will be the third-highest in 2019. China (33%) and Indonesia (29%) will lead the race. It should also be taken into consideration that the revenue base of these countries is much smaller as compared to that of mature countries. “The shift from ‘cloud first’ to a ‘cloud only’ model is pushing organizations in India to increase their spending on public cloud services to advance their digital business initiatives,” said Sid Nag, research VP at Gartner. “Disinvestments in new data centers are also one of the early signs of this move.” According to 2019 Gartner CIO Agenda survey, CIOs in India expect a rise of 2.9% in their IT budgets in 2019, which is only marginally less than budget growth rate in 2018 (3%). Their enterprises are increasingly changing the business models and moving to cloud. They want to reduce their capital spending by consolidating the existing data centers and halting the development of new ones. In 2019, Gartner expects that software as a service (SaaS) will be the fastest growing market segment (23%) in India. Also, organizations buying infrastructure as a service (IaaS) will grow by 22% In 2019. Cloud adoption would also need Indian enterprises to increase their spending on security. “We’ve witnessed an increase in the number of targeted attacks on Indian organizations compared to a few years ago,” said Rajpreet Kaur, principal research analyst at Gartner. “They will continue to rise if local CIOs or CISOs don’t develop a cybersecurity roadmap.” As part of this, they will need to use technologies like web application firewalls (WAFs), cloud access security brokers (CASBs), cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs) and microsegmentation platforms. “Moving to the cloud is one thing, but CIOs need to ensure operational control of the virtual organization,” said Ms. Kaur. “It isn’t about whether the cloud is secure; it’s about how securely the enterprise is using it.” READ NEXT: CIOs in Australia and New Zealand slow-moving towards digital business transformation: Gartner