India's Public Cloud Services Market to Top $800 Million in 2015: Gartner

Public cloud services market in India is expected to grow about 33 percent to touch $838 million by the end of this year, driven by strong growth in cloud infrastructure and security solutions, research firm Gartner said today.

The public cloud services market stood at about $632 million in 2014.

High rates of spending on cloud services in India is expected to continue through 2018 and the market is poised to reach $1.9 billion by the same time, Gartner said in a statement.

"In 2015, public cloud services revenue is driven by high rates of growth in key market segments, cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), cloud management and security services and cloud application infrastructure platform as a service (PaaS)," it said.

Cloud computing refers to a pay-per-use model of computing where applications and software are accessed over the Internet and not owned by users.

IT companies can save huge costs on these products as they would not have to invest in purchasing them, resulting in reduced IT costs.

Some organisations, especially larger ones, set up a cloud-like infrastructure in their own data centre to secure data, which is called a private cloud.

Public cloud refers to providers such as Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com, whose shared services are available to all.

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Spending on IaaS is expected to total $104.8 million in 2015, an increase of 38 percent over last year.

On the other hand, spending on cloud management/security and PaaS is forecast to grow at 35.4 percent to $56.7 million and $84.6 million, respectively during the same period.

"Organisations in India seeking IT outsourcing services are increasingly turning to public cloud services as an alternative to traditional ITO offerings," Gartner Research Vice President Ed Anderson said.

In fact, cloud services are not only being used for low-value or transient workloads but also increasingly for production workloads, including some mission-critical initiatives, he added.

According to Gartner's cloud adoption survey, 53 percent of organisations in India indicated they are using cloud services today, with another 43 percent indicating plans to begin using cloud services in the next 12 months.

"Business process as a service (BPaaS) is expected to grow from $130 million in 2014 to $351 million in 2018.

SaaS is expected to grow from $246 million in 2014 to $707 million in 2018," Gartner Senior Research Analyst Fred Ng said.

The growth of cloud services varies by country and specific cloud service type and the Indian market is unique in that demand is consistently high for all types of cloud services, he added.