Google Cloud in collaboration with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has announced the India findings of a study, titled “Ascent to the Cloud: How Six Key APAC Economies can Lift-off”, and stated that the country’s large and fast-growing public cloud market, continues to show enormous potential for rapid growth in public cloud. 

Projected to grow at a CAGR of 25% from $3 billion in 2018 to $8 billion in 2023, public cloud deployments in India have the potential to contribute approximately $100 billion in GDP cumulatively from 2019 to 2023. When annualised, this is equivalent to 0.6% of GDP and 15% of the GDP impact of the IT industry and 25% of the textile industry in India — both key industries in India.

The study entailed discussions with experts and senior stakeholders across industry verticals and a survey of 1,000+ IT decision-makers across the Asia Pacific region, including India. Sectors surveyed included digital native businesses and internet start-ups, along with banking and financial services, retail, media, gaming, public sector and manufacturing industry.

Faster Time To Market A Core Driver For Cloud Adoption 

India’s digital-native businesses, along with media and entertainment companies, are the biggest drivers of public cloud adoption. Respondents cited the faster launch of new products and services, higher team productivity and cloud service providers’ ability to deliver enhanced security as key reasons for adopting cloud computing. 

Retail and consumer goods players are also increasingly exploring opportunities to digitise and develop capabilities in artificial intelligence and machine learning-enabled by the public cloud. 

Rick Harshman, managing director of Google Cloud in the Asia Pacific, said, “Traditional retailers are expanding into e-commerce to capture digital and omnichannel revenue growth, and 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 retail customers to become more customer-centric and data-driven so they can optimise their spend across channels, plan inventory, and manage their supply chains.”

The study found that manufacturers and financial institutions, on the other hand, 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. For such organisations, strong security and compliance standards were cited as a deciding factor when choosing between public cloud vendors.

“Cloud providers invest more resources in security than most enterprises put into securing their on-premise environments, and the financial institutions that we work with globally around fraud detection, risk analytics, smart pricing, and personalisation rank a better security and compliance environment as a key benefit of adopting public cloud solutions,” he added.

Cultivating Cloud-Ready Talent Critical 

According to the report, the business efficiencies and the 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 from 2019 to 2023. 

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, and across industry verticals. Another 83,000 direct roles will be related to core business functions such as marketing, finance, operations etc. across industry verticals. 

“We have seen first hand the incredible progress that’s possible when companies and countries embrace a cloud-first future. We’re working with higher education institutions and customers to train cloud-native engineers at an aggressive rate and broadening access to training and certification to help groom a pool of cloud-ready talent to help Indian businesses grow and scale with the cloud,” said Harshman.

Google Cloud’s career readiness program has been designed to provide students with training, mentorship and certification to launch their careers with companies seeking cloud talent.

The company has also launched the Google Cloud Computing Foundations Course on the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) platform. The eight-week course aims to impart knowledge and hands-on training around cloud infrastructure, big data, and machine learning to students with little to no background or experience in cloud computing.