CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with the CEO & Founder, CloudThat- Bhavesh Goswami.
Impact of the Cloud on India
The virtual and hybrid worlds of the pandemic and post-pandemic period have increased the dependence on the cloud and made it a mandate for achieving flexibility, agility, and innovation. Amid this rapid digital transformation, Indian organizations, too, have jumped on the bandwagon to incorporate cloud solutions for business growth.
The NASSCOM-EY survey reveals that 78% of Indian IT companies, 53% of Healthcare and BFSI firms, and 49% of Pharmaceuticals have moved to the cloud post-2019. And the latest IDC reports further build on these stats by revealing that 40% of all Indian organizations will implement dedicated cloud services either in a service provider facility or on-premise by 2024.
Media companies and digital natives are driving cloud adoption in India with financial institutions, manufacturers, retailers, and large enterprises following the trail. Moreover, over 20 Indian start-ups have achieved unicorn status in 2022 and 80% of them find PaaS and IaaS integral to their success, according to Inc 42. These hail from a range of businesses including food delivery, transportation, online grocery shopping, mobile learning, and hotel booking.
Even at CloudThat, it was the cloud that helped us scale and expand our footprints at a time when other organizations were experiencing layoffs and footfalls. The Indian government has also issued several cloud-first initiatives like MyGov Saathi, Curfew ePass, Covid-19 repository, and Aarogya Setu to ensure the timely launch of services for the citizens.
In fact, CoWIN – an end-to-end vaccination platform built on AWS cloud – was one of India’s most successful cloud initiatives. As per CoWIN data, India achieved a milestone by administering 225 lakhs vaccination doses in a single day at a rate of 28,000 doses per minute or 466 doses per second.
India has also set benchmarks in public cloud usage. In 2019, Hotstar – an Indian internet streaming service provider – recorded 25.3 million simultaneous viewers for live streaming of a cricket match and created a global record for viewership of a live program, back then.
According to a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) analysis, the country is one of the fastest-growing public cloud markets in the APAC region with a projected growth rate of 25% and a growth value of USD 6 billion between 2018 and 2023.
The power of the cloud in the Indian Economy
Despite India being at nascent stages in cloud adoption, cloud computing has proven to be the foundation of technology-led innovation, digital transformation, and business growth at scale in the Indian economy.
With a CAGR of 44%, the Indian cloud market has outpaced the global market in terms of growth rate, according to a NASSCOM report. This growth accrues to four factors – a growing digital population, the digitization of enterprises, the inflow of investments, and favorable government policies. Further, IDC estimates the Indian public cloud market to reach USD 10.8 billion by 2025 with a CAGR of 24.1%.
To go by NASSCOM’s report, large-scale cloud adoption has the potential to contribute USD 380 billion to India’s GDP by 2026 and create 14 million employment opportunities with a 3x growth rate. Moreover, an all-round effort can increase the country’s cloud spending by 25-30% over the next 5 years.
And AWS’s investment in the Indian economy is making this growth a plausible reality. The new AWS Hyderabad region itself is estimated to support 48,000+ full-time jobs annually through an investment of 36,300 crores by 2030. Besides, both the Indian government and private enterprises …….