Highlighting India’s enormous potential for rapid growth in the public cloud, a study has said that public cloud deployments in the country can contribute approximately $100 billion (approx 10,000 crores) in GDP cumulatively from 2019 to 2023. The deployments are projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25 per cent from $3 billion in 2018 to $8 billion in 2023. The study also said that the business efficiencies and growth resulting from public cloud deployments also have the potential to lead to up to 240,000 jobs and impact another 743,000 jobs through second order effects.
A study, ‘Ascent to the Cloud: How Six Key APAC Economies can Lift-off’, found that when the contribution is annualised, this is equivalent to 0.6 per cent of GDP, and 15 per cent of the GDP impact of the IT industry and 25 per cent of the textile industry in India. About the jobs, the study explains that of the 240,000 direct jobs, around 157,000 will be in digital and technology-related roles such as data scientists, product managers, engineering, design, user experience and infrastructure management jobs with cloud service providers, IT service providers, among others. Another 83,000 direct roles will be related to core business functions (marketing, finance, operations etc.) across industry verticals.
The study, which was commissioned by Google Cloud and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), entailed discussions with experts and senior stakeholders across industry verticals and a survey of over 1,000 IT decision makers across the Asia Pacific region, including India. Sectors surveyed included digital native businesses and internet start-ups, banking and financial services, retail, media and gaming, public sector and manufacturing.
The findings said that India’s digital-native businesses and media and entertainment companies are the biggest drivers of public cloud adoption. Citing respondents, the study reported that faster launch of new products and services, higher team productivity and cloud service providers’ ability to deliver enhanced security are the key reasons for adopting cloud computing. Moreover, retail and consumer goods players are increasingly exploring opportunities to digitise and develop capabilities in artificial intelligence and machine learning enabled by the technology.
‘Traditional retailers are expanding into e-commerce to capture digital and omnichannel revenue growth, and they’re turning to the public cloud to help them scale up quickly and handle peak loads during special sales like Diwali. Access to cloud-based smart data analytics solutions also enables our retailer customers to become more customer-centric and data-driven so they can optimise their spend across channels, plan inventory and manage their supply chains,’ Rick Harshman, managing director of Google Cloud in Asia Pacific, said in a statement.
The study also found that manufacturers and financial institutions are still in the early stages of public cloud adoption. ‘This was due in part to the perceived complexity of migrating legacy data and evolving government regulations around data and security,’ the report noted.
