Public cloud deployments to create jobs, contribute $100 bn to GDP by 2023: Google BCG

Public cloud deployments could contribute close to $100 billion to the country’s GDP by 2023, according to a Google Cloud Platform and Boston Consulting Group report.

The GDP of six Asia Pacific countries -- Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, Singapore and Indonesia) -- is cumulatively estimated at $450 billion if they continue to adopt public cloud at the current rate, the report said. 

The report Ascent to Cloud: How Six Key APAC Economies can Lift-off said that the Indian public cloud market is projected to grow at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 25% to $8 billion in 2023 from $3 billion in 2018. On an annual basis, this would be 0.6% of India’s GDP. The report surveyed over a thousand decision makers from the information technology (IT) industry across the Asia Pacific region in the digital-native, media, retail and financial services verticals.

Read: Worldwide public cloud revenue to grow by 17% in 2020

Public cloud could lead to 2.4 lakh direct jobs and 7.43 lakh indirect jobs by 2023, according to the report. Of the 2.4 lakh direct jobs, 1.57 lakh will be in digital and technology-related roles, while 83,000 will be related to core business functions such as marketing, finance and operations, the report added.

The key drivers of those jobs would be faster time-to-market, better public cloud security and better productivity. However, limited understanding of data privacy, lack of robust networking infrastructure and the risks and costs associated with moving away from legacy systems continue to pose a challenge.

Also read: Enterprises spent four times more on cloud security in 2019 

The report also said that manufacturers and financial institutions were still in the early stages of public cloud adoption, mostly due to evolving government regulations and the hassle of migrating legacy data to the cloud. For financial companies at the initial stages of public cloud adoption, the key factors for onboarding were strong security and compliance standards of cloud service providers.

“The financial institutions that we work with globally around fraud detection, risk analytics, smart pricing and personalisation rank a better security and compliance environment as a key benefit of adopting public cloud solutions,” Rick Harshman, managing director for Asia Pacific of Google Cloud Platform, said.

Lack of good network infrastructure in the country, translating to slow internet connectivity, could also hamper the adoption of public cloud, the report said, while adding that this problem could be mitigated by cloud providers who could design an architecture to minimise network load.