How Cloud Computing Can Empower Digital Transformation in India

'Digital India' is the roadmap of our nation towards digital transformation. The path of this transformation has been unanimously an advantage for common populous, enterprises, MSMEs and government bodies. But with a country holding a billion population would demand a technology that would collect, integrate and distribute crucial data seamlessly. Digital India envisages on creating a digital mark in people's lives. Technologies based on mobility, analytics, Internet of Things and most importantly cloud technologies are the stepping stones of digital initiatives. The implications of digital transformation are to manage tremendous data and delivering them at the fingertips of the public via cloud technologies.

Data centres have become critical in the transformation to digital technologies, IT giants have alarmingly recognised that the current data centres have reached their threshold in buttressing government bodies to work and enable services. Government's Information technology departments are focusing on investments for the consolidation of data centres and newer technologies to enable better services.

In such a scenario, the tech giant Google is bidding on India to grow its portion of booming Indian cloud market opportunity. Google witnessed a slow alignment of Indian companies towards cloud technologies and a focussed approach in the Indian market will help them to get a major pie. "Early bird eats the worm" to solidify this Google started offering cloud platform training. Recently Google announced Google cloud India which will enable Indian enterprises to take advantage of high speeds, low latency and performance benefits offered by the Google Cloud Platform service. Cloud platform enables services such as computing, big data, storage and networking for global customers. Catching up Google, Amazon and Microsoft are converging their focus on the Indian market in cloud platform services.

The global early adopters are opened to humongous opportunities as large enterprises can implement it in an array of Indian business ranging from banking, manufacturing, automobile, retail, media, healthcare which have marked their way towards cloud computing. Since last year Google has managed to lure a large number of Indian enterprises to the paid Google Cloud platform and these companies which are entering the cloud platform are predominantly using machine learning and artificial intelligence. Some of the key customers of Google cloud platforms in the Indian market are L&T Finance, Hike Messenger, Titan, Share chat and Quikr.

According to Gartner, the public cloud services market in India is projected to grow 38% in 2017 to touch $1.81 billion. The highest growth will be driven by infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which is projected to grow at 49.2% in 2017, followed by 33% in software as a service (SaaS) and 32.1% in platform as a service (PaaS).

The technology giants also believe that the more involvement of cloud in business would demand more skilled talent in the country. De facto, these companies collaborated with Coursera a leading global online education platform to deliver a series of courses on cloud platforms which would accelerate the growth of cloud services in the nation.