India's public cloud end-user spending to touch $7.3 bn in 2022: Gartner

The end-user spending on public cloud services in India is expected to touch $7.3 billion in 2022, an increase of 29.6% over the previous year, according to research firm Gartner.  

The Indian end-user spending on public cloud is slower than the 34.6% forecast in 2021. However, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is expected to grow by 40% in 2022 and hit $2.4 billion.  

IaaS is also expected to make up 32.3% of the total investments in public cloud services in 2022.  

“In India, the policy infrastructure is emerging as an important contributor to public cloud growth. For example, the recently launched public cloud government initiatives Meghraj and Cloud Vision for India 2022 will prove useful for small and medium businesses,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner.  

Additionally, initiatives towards building a skilled workforce in partnership with private IT players is expected to contribute to the effort by the government to strengthen the public cloud here.

Other key areas responsible for public growth in India are cloud business process services (BPaaS), Cloud application services (SaaS), Cloud desktop as a service (DaaS) and cloud management and security services.  

While SaaS is expected to touch $2.16 billion next year, BpaaS and PaaS are expected to reach figures of $1.9 million and $1.1 million respectively in 2022. Cloud security expenditure is expected to grow by 23.7% and touch $0.5 million by the end of next year.  

“The next step in the growth of cloud in India will be the adoption of cloud native technologies. Indian CIOs will look to reimagine and refashion their applications and workloads using containers and microservices as well as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML),” added Nag.  

The study was conducted as part of Gartner’s third quarter update for 2021 in its "Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2019-2025” report.

Globally, the end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to hit $332 billion in  2021 up from $270 billion in 2020.