The coronavirus outbreak has pushed the adoption of cloud services globally. The surge is being compared by the story of the sage who won a game of chess against a king and as a prize asked for a grain of rice on the first square on the chessboard and double it for every consequent square. Doubling the number of grains of rice on each square on a chessboard would mean over 18 quintillion grains of rice or 1.4 million metric tonnes. “The cloud market is just entering the second half of the chessboard,” says Vaibhav Gawde, Head-Solution Engineering, Oracle India. That means, there is going to be phenomenal growth in the cloud business. The pursuit of higher performance, lower costs, easier integration and smoother cloud migration has made cloud services important for organizations of all sizes, across sectors.

While the current global addressable market for cloud and private cloud is $213 billion, this pales in comparison to the worldwide IT spending of $3.8 trillion. Enterprise IT comprises of business-critical work (the core applications) and peripheral. This ratio has been changing for some time. Currently, peripheral is a 36 percent opportunity globally while the core accounts for the balance 64 percent. As things stand, a quarter of the peripheral is on premise, which means 75 percent can be cloudified.

Vaibhav explains that as far as the core is concerned, due to legacy issues and being crucial-availability and performance issues-to the enterprise, almost 80 percent is on-premises. That is not easy for the enterprise. Overall 80 percent of the business-critical and 25 percent of the peripheral account for 60 percent of the workload that will predominantly be on premise.

According to a recent NASSCOM, the Indian cloud computing market is currently valued at $2.2 billion and is expected to grow at 30 percent (year-on-year) to reach $7.1 billion by 2022. Oracle offers highly automated and secure second-generation cloud infrastructure driven by self-securing, self-repairing and self-driving Autonomous Database. In fact, this is unique to Oracle and makes us stand apart when it comes to security.