The company said the Indian IT market outlook had been discussed at its Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo India which ended on Wednesday.
“The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic was the starting point of the Cloud 2.0 era,” said Sid Nag, research vice-president at Gartner.
“Indian enterprises were not ready for the large scale of remote work. However, public cloud delivered on its promise of scalability, cost efficiency and business resilience for Indian enterprises during this critical time in 2020.
Gartner said that in 2021, managed services and cloud infrastructure would make up 8% of the total IT spending in India. While cloud application services (SaaS) were expected to be the biggest segment, cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS) would see the most growth, the company said.
It said Indian businesses were at an early stage of cloud adoption compared to the rest of the world, with the pandemic having speeded up adoption.
As employees moved to working from home, applications like email, Web hosting, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and human resources had been moved to the cloud, so that they could be accessed around the clock.
“While end-user spending on cloud in India is increasing, there is a long road ahead for Indian enterprises to achieve the same market maturity as the US or Europe," said Nag.
"India-based organisations and their chief information officers need to focus on the cultural shift that will make them cloud-ready and give them a competitive edge."
