Amazon, Microsoft and Google are often referred to as the Big 3 in the cloud infrastructure market. Cloud provides better data storage, data security, flexibility, increased collaboration between employees, and changes the workflow of small businesses and large enterprises to help them make better decisions while decreasing costs. it’s important to note that it’s difficult to get a firm grip on what the cloud numbers actually mean and what each company includes in that cloud revenue category. Considering all the potential and development cloud computing has undergone in recent years, there are also many challenges businesses are facing. The main reason of shifting is expensive and highest hidden cost.



Cloud growth has a wrong perception in the minds of people. People look at Cloud growth from the revenue of IaaS business only, while majority of the Cloud growth is happening in SaaS. Revenue of SaaS across the world is expected to touch $150B in next 5 years and that in itself is going to be huge. IaaS revenue of all the Cloud service providers will remain around $75B after 5 years, so the major opportunity right now seems to be in SaaS and the good news for every small company here in India is that anyone can become a SaaS player in this market. you don’t need a Data Center and you don’t need to have your own Cloud servers to become a SaaS company. Anyone in the market with a brilliant software solution can put that on someone’s cloud and become a SaaS company.


Edge infrastructure has the potential to transform enterprises. Edge is the future, as data is processed where it is generated. India will witness at least 10,000 edge data centers over the next decade as more and more applications get closer to the customers. Most of the edge data centers would be deployed in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities in India. IoT, Cloud, OTT, Gaming will be the key drivers for edge computing. Cloud adoption in India is still at its nascent stage. SaaS applications are being consumed more rapidly, while Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is underpenetrated. IaaS adopting in India is under 5% at the moment and will take another decade to cross the 50% mark meaning we will witness real growth in the next 3,000 days in the country. Employment in cloud will also grow as millions of cloud experts would be required by the year 2030. Public cloud infrastructure in India will also grow as hyperscalers such as Amazon, Azure, Google Cloud will continue make investments in the country to tap the growth.


With over one billion mobile users, 500 million smart phone users, 376 million social media users India is one of the large data consuming nation. WhatsApp alone has 400 million users. This apart, mobile payment transactions are estimated to cross a billion per month, while OTT consumers are consuming on demand movies. 475 million Indian’s engage in ecommerce transactions. However, all the data may not be stored in India. Most likely it may be stored in other countries. However, all this will soon change as India is planning to enact the Personal Data Protection (PDP) bill, thus compelling all multinationals to localize the data requiring at least 20 million square feet in addition to the current capacity by 2030 taking the total service provider footprint in the zone of 30 million square feet including edge data centers. As a result, India will be one of the largest data center locations in the world and generating employment in the zone of a million people directly and indirectly across the country.

Data Centers will become the backbone of all future Technologies in India, so the Data Center business should not be looked from the colocation footprint size or their Dollar revenue. If we look at what Quantum computing will be doing for us in the future or all the AI, ML, IoT, Blockchain workloads of the future then each rack inside a Data Center will be generating Petabytes of data which will be worth Millions of Dollars, but the Rack inside the Data Center would be worth only $15k a year. so the annual revenue of Data Centers from the Racks will go upto $5 Billion by 2024, but the revenue getting generated from the processing of data happening inside these Data Centers would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. In the future, everything is going to be Software defined and that cannot happen without Data Centers.


Lastly, Edge computing has the potential to alter cost structures and radically change ways of doing business and edge computing brings a lot of challenges to Cloud business. Edge is not just going to be a Data Center closer to customers end-use, but future Edge computing is going to happen inside the machines or vehicles at the edge.