80% c-suite executives will increase their cloud budgets over the next 12 months: EY

Almost 80% of the c-suite executives surveyed across verticals said they will increase their cloud budgets over the next twelve months, said EY, citing the newly launched report by the company on cloud at the on-going Nasscom Technology & Leadership Forum (NTLF) 2022 held virtually. 

“We found more acceptance for hybrid cloud models," said Nitin Bhatt, technology sector leader, EY. Business leaders are using cloud as a platform of growth and innovation, driving agility and transformation in their companies." 

Bhatt further said that among the many challenges, digital talent shortage is a key issue and there is a huge focus on automation and reskilling to address this. Some executives also viewed moving to the cloud as a “business risk and are worried about data breaches and what that would do to customers’ trust." 

“But the leading companies were not as concerned and they spent time upfront in identifying critical risks related to data privacy, compliance obligations, and customer commitments before moving to the cloud. And this really helped build security by design. Leading companies also did a good job in defining the right security metrics and monitoring them regularly. However, the majority of the companies reported significant gaps in both of these areas," he added. “And these have emerged as key opportunities for strengthening the overall security posture, building trust and accelerating cloud adoption." 

Nitin Sawant, cloud practice leader, EY said that having surveyed small, medium and large industries, three key imperatives stand out. Firstly, unlike before, cost savings is no more the key driver for cloud adoption, instead, growth and transformation are the key drivers now. Secondly, new ways of working have come up due to the pandemic which in turn increased cloud adoption due to workplace productivity solutions. Finally, data privacy and data localization and also the data residency are now becoming imperative in almost all countries and that mandate has really accelerated the adoption of cloud. 

Digital payments, tele-consultation with doctors and online education during pandemic are driving cloud across the sectors and this is now being leveraged using different cloud models, mentioned Sawant. 

“Due to the rush and the urgency during the pandemic we are seeing SaaS as the highest adoption model in the industry, primarily because we did not have the time to really go on with our digital channels and reach out to our customers, during the pandemic," Sawant informs. 

He, however, says that as we are coming out of the pandemic, there is immense adoption of the hybrid model and there is also a rising demand for Platform-as-a-Service models where we can leverage the huge talent that we have within India for cloud-native development. Smaller organizations have also adopted public cloud more rigorously because of the need for faster time to market during the pandemic.