NASSCOM report predicts cloud talent in India to grow to 1.5 mn by 2025

India’s talent pool of cloud professionals across verticals is set to grow to 1.5 million by 2025, at a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 24%, said software industry body NASSCOM in a report.

The report said that India ranks third globally with 6,08,000 professionals catering to high demand for cloud solutions.

The rate of growth for cloud-related roles in India stood at 40% year-on-year with 380,000 job openings in 2020 alone, said the report titled ‘Cloud Skills: Powering India’s Digital DNA’ and published by NASSCOM in association with Draup.

The report was released in strategic partnership with TCS and Accenture for research.

The report said that the demand for cloud skills outweighs the current supply and with aggressive talent building roadmap, the pool of professional can grow up to 1.8 million by 2025, making India the world’s second largest cloud talent hub.

India’s cloud market is estimated to grow 26% year-on-year to a $5.6 billion market by 2022.

Apart from increased cloud adoption due to the pandemic, the growth in India’s SaaS startup ecosystem has been a key driver for the demand for talent, said the report.

Nearly 40,000 cloud professionals are employed with SaaS startups in India, estimated the report.

The report added that cloud roles in the sector of native application development, network virtualisation, containerization and service architecture are gaining significance apart from specialised skills in cloud security and related disciplines.

“Cloud adoption has witnessed an accelerated adoption during the pandemic as enterprises focused on building hybrid work models, collaboration infrastructure and business continuity,” Debjani Ghosh, president of NASSCOM, said in a statement.

She added, “Cloud has moved from being a relative back-end to a front-end (business-facing) technology, enabling on-demand access to resources.

For India to carve itself a unique identity as a global hub for cloud solutions, a concentrated public-private partnership, and large-scale skilling is the key.”

NASSCOM said that the demand-supply gap can be filled by skilling at scale as well as upskilling traditional software engineering, IT and networking and cybersecurity roles.