Current Analysis has released its study titled “Enterprise ICT Investment Insights Study 2014” which indicates that cloud computing is the top priority among Indian enterprises. According to the study, a significant 68 per cent of enterprises in India, with 100-plus employees, are using cloud-based services, while the remaining 32 per cent plan to do so over the next 24 months. This is in line with trends in the larger Asia-Pacific market, where the adoption of cloud-based services is as high as 65 per cent. This study spans 19 countries across four key regions.

The study also finds that the scale of cloud services adoption easily surpasses those of other new-generation ICT services, including Big Data and Enterprise Mobility. While 39 per cent of the respondents ranked Cloud as their top investment priority in India, 16 per cent said it would be Big Data while 12 per cent favoured Enterprise Mobility. Network Security jointly ranked as second highest investment priority, along with Big Data.

“India is fast emerging as a high-growth market for cloud services, led thus far by the private cloud segment. However, there is a huge potential for adoption of public cloud services, which are in their early stages of market development and would need greater thrust from players such as IBM SoftLayer, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google, NTT Communications and Rackspace, to win enterprise trust and confidence for moving their workloads on the public Cloud”, said Harish Taori, research director, Asia-Pacific region, Current Analysis.

“It is highly notable that cloud has emerged as a leading investment priority for Indian enterprises, surpassing even Network Security investments. However, this certainly doesn’t amount to the ICT decision makers lowering their guards when it comes to the all-vital area of IT security. It is just that they have gotten comfortable with the private clouds set up by their long-standing IT service partners like TCS, IBM, HP, Wipro and Tech Mahindra, among others”, said Deepak Kumar, principal analyst, Asia-Pacific region, Current Analysis.

Other key findings of the Enterprise ICT Investment Insights Study 2014 include:

• For Infrastructure-as–a-Service (IaaS), 38 per cent respondents said they opted for a single cloud service provider while 35 per cent said they are using two service providers and another 8 per cent said they have three service providers. Around 12 per cent enterprises have even gone for four or more suppliers.
• For Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), the enterprises that opted for one, two, three and more service providers, stood at 35 per cent, 37 per cent, eight per cent and four per cent, respectively.
• For Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), the enterprises that had opted for one, two, three and more service providers, stood at 35 per cent, 29 per cent, 25 per cent and 10 per cent, respectively.
• Microsoft, IBM SoftLayer, HP, AWS, Google, Salesforce.com, Red Hat, Oracle and SAP were among the leading cloud service providers across the IaaS, PaaS and SaaS market segments.
• When moving a workload to cloud, security (62 per cent) continued to be the biggest concern for enterprises, followed by data privacy (42 per cent).
• IT service providers were also preferred partners for managed network services, enterprise mobility and Big Data and Analytics solutions. However, consulting companies like Accenture, Capgemini and Deloitte came close enough as preferred partners for implementing Enterprise Mobility solutions.
• Similarly, for managed secure network-to-cloud solutions too, consulting companies were a close second as preferred.
• Data Centre investments showed signs of falling behind on the enterprises’ priority list, with about 33 per cent respondents saying it was a last investment priority for them and a mere four per cent said it was still a top investment priority. These findings imply that enterprise priorities are moving from capex to opex model with cloud services being the highest investment priority for enterprises in India.