Cloud redefined: “No-cloud’ policy to be almost extinct

The year 2016 proved to be a booming one for cloud computing in India. Several cloud vendors like AWS, Microsoft and Salesforce set up their datacenters in the country to lure in more customers, and did so successfully. From just being one of the new kids on the block, cloud has come a long way.

Cloud computing redefined the infrastructure of the entire IT industry, creating one of the biggest disruptions in enterprise IT. Research analyst firm Gartner, predicts that by 2020, “a corporate ‘no-cloud’ policy will be as rare as a ‘no-internet’ policy is today” with almost all technology innovations being cloud-centric.

However, Gartner adds that cloud isn’t likely to overtake the entire business. Most companies will actually adopt a hybrid cloud usage. Technology providers will soon start assuming that customers are cloud capable–probably one of the biggest reasons why moving to the cloud should be on everyone’s strategy, at least partly.

Era of silver lining

According to IDC, infrastructure expenditure on cloud environments is going to accelerate at a 12.5 percent CAGR from 2015-2020 and reach USD 57.8 billion in 2020. Expenditure on cloud is predicted to represent almost 48 percent of the total IT infrastructure spending in 2020, while non-cloud IT infrastructure spending will decline at a 1.3 percent CAGR.

The research firm predicts that spending on cloud infrastructure by public cloud service providers will be at 13.8 percent CAGR and reach USD 37.5 billion. However, the spending in private cloud IT infrastructure will experience a CAGR of 10.2 percent and reach USD 20.3 billion-19.2 billion.

IDC also predicted that the worldwide revenues from public cloud services will be more than USD 195 billion in the year 2020, twice of what it was in 2016. Additionally, while Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) remains the most dominant type of cloud computing, the revenues of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are expected to grow at a faster rate of 27 percent and 30 percent CAGR respectively from 2015-2020.

According to IDC, the primary driver of public cloud services globally would be large enterprises, who are predicted to spend over USD 80 billion in 2019 in this domain. Telecommunications is predicted to be the fastest growing vertical in spending on public cloud services, followed by industries like education, retail, transportation and media.

Research firm, Forrester, predicts that hyperconverged infrastructure will help private cloud get real. It also expects enterprises to avoid private cloud software suites which can prove to be complex, and costly.

Along the right path

According to Gartner, the public cloud services market in the mature APAC region is poised to grow at 15.1 percent in 2017 to USD 9.3 billion. The analyst firm categorises Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea as the mature Asia-Pacific market.

It predicts that by 2019, the total public cloud services spending in this region will rise to USD 12.4 billion. SaaS remains the fastest growing segment in this domain with a total predicted expenditure of over USD 2 billion. By the year 2020, the APAC public cloud services market will reach USD 14.5 billion with a SaaS market of nearly USD 4 billion.

The Indian public cloud services market is projected to grow at a pace of 37 percent and reach USD 1.7 billion in 2017, says Gartner. Unlike the global and APAC markets, the Indian market favours the IaaS over Saas, with the former predicted to grow at nearly 50 percent.

With challenges of data residency being drastically reduced by vendors setting up datacenters in the country, 2017 might just become the year of cloud for the Indian enterprise.