Gartner’s report states that the end-user expense on cloud services in India could touch $4.4 billion in 2021. This is a rise of 31.4 percent as compared to last year. This is predictable to grow further to $5.62 billion in 2022.

The ongoing trend of augmented remote workers in 2021, would lead to an increase in spending on desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

Furthermore, these segments are predicted to grow 47.7 percent (to $73 million) and 52.2 percent (to $1.44 billion), respectively.
Indian chief information officers (CIOs) saw the benefits of cloud during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, Gartner research vice president Sid Nag said.

He further adds, "To build business resilience and minimize the impact of continued disruptions, investing in cloud is unavoidable. India has experienced consistent double-digit growth in cloud spending over the last three years, the pandemic only expedited the shift."

Spending on Cloud Business Process Services (BPaaS) is expected to grow 9.2 percent to $207 million, Cloud Application Infrastructure Services (PaaS) by 30.5 percent to $997 million, Cloud Application Services (SaaS) by 20.8 percent to $1.41 billion, and Cloud Management and Security Services by 18 percent to $317 million in 2021.

Gartner said spending on SaaS and cloud management and security services will experience double digit growth in India for the first time.

Sid Nag says, "SaaS has been pivotal in supporting the sudden increase in the mobile workforce, as well as customers, in 2020.
Learning from this, Indian CIOs will continue to build on the above trend as they move towards a composable business environment."

Within SaaS, customer experience and relationship management and content services will be the highest growing segments in 2021, forecast to grow 24.9 percent and 26.1 percent, respectively, according to Gartner.

In 2020, spending on e-mail and authoring declined 0.2 per cent but this trend will reverse in 2021, it added.
E-mail and authoring is expected to grow 25.1 percent this year.

With the increase in remote workers by organizations due to the pandemic, more business is being conducted using email and collaboration tools, which will drive the growth of these services, it said.