Indian enterprises to spend half their IT budget on hybrid cloud: IBM report

Indian enterprises spend close to 17 percent of their IT budget on cloud, and by 2023 almost half of the cloud budget will be on hybrid, which is a combination of on premise, private and public cloud, according to a report by IBM.

According to a Gartner report, IT spending in India will total $83.5 billion in 2020, a 8.1 percent decline at the back of COVID-19.

The report, ‘The hybrid cloud platform advantage: A guiding star to enterprise transformation in India’, by the IBM Institute for Business Value in collaboration with Oxford Economics, covered 6,000 executives globally including 412 executives from India, across industries, job titles and geographies.

The period of the survey was between February and April 2020.

This comes at a time when pace of cloud adoption accelerated as companies migrated to ensure business continuity. Arvind Krishna, chief executive officer, IBM, said during IBM Think event in May that the company has witnessed cloud being adopted at a much faster pace amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report too reflects that. The survey pointed out that the majority of companies’ cloud budgets are being allocated to hybrid cloud platforms even as their public cloud spend is set to reduce from 50 percent share now to 43 percent by 2023.

It pointed out that Indian executives are increasingly adopting cloud as they invest in business transformation capabilities and are also seeing return on value for their investments.

Indian executives, the report said, get 2.6 times of their investment in cloud over the period of 10 years.

In addition, the report said, most industries will exhibit growth in the number of clouds they will deploy, which can go up to 10 clouds particularly in insurance, telecommunications and retail as these industries will continue to expand multiple cloud deployments in the next three years.

Multi-cloud refers to using more than one cloud vendor by the company. Four major players in the cloud market are: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Azure and IBM.