The public cloud services revenue in India is projected to total $2.4 billion in 2019, an increase of 24.3 per cent from 2018, according to a study by Gartner.

Although India’s revenue represents 1.2 per cent of the global public cloud services total in 2019, India ranks among the nine countries whose growth rate will be higher than the global average growth rate (16 per cent). India is also on pace to record the third-highest growth rate in 2019, after China (33 per cent) and Indonesia (29 per cent), taking into consideration the fact that their revenue base is much smaller than those of mature markets, it said.

“The shift from ‘cloud first’ to a ‘cloud only’ model is pushing organisations in India to increase their spending on public cloud services, to advance their digital business initiatives,” said Sid Nag, research vice-president at Gartner. “Disinvestments in new data centres are also one of the early signs of this move.”

The survey found that 34 per cent of Chief Investment Officers in India are expected to increase their spending on cloud services in 2019. “Organisations want to reduce capital expenditure spend by consolidating existing data centres and halting the build-out of new ones,” said Nag.

Cloud application services (SaaS) is on pace to be the fastest-growing market segment in India in 2019, accounting for nearly half of the total public cloud services revenue year-over-year. SaaS revenue is estimated to grow 23 per cent in 2019 to reach $1.15 billion. It is followed by cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS) spending, which is estimated to grow 22 per cent in 2019.

The growth of SaaS spending is fuelled by increased end-user spending on customer relationship management (CRM), as organisations in India move away from commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and licence-based on-premises software to a subscription-based SaaS model to gain agility, innovation and cost-efficiency.

The move to digital is forcing Indian organisations to increase their spending on security, as digitalising platforms and networks brings with it heightened exposure to threats and risks.

“We’ve witnessed an increase in the number of targeted attacks on Indian organisations compared with 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 creating a robust cybersecurity roadmap, Indian organisations need to use a mix of native and third-party controls. Furthermore, they should use technologies such as web application firewalls (WAFs), cloud access security brokers (CASBs), cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs) and microsegmentation platforms as go-to options to secure cloud in their organisations.

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