By Sachin Salian, Sr. Vice President & Business Head – Cloud & Data Services, Writer Information
Cloud adoption in India has moved beyond boardroom deliberation to become an embedded layer of enterprise operations. Across banking, healthcare, and government infrastructure, cloud has become the default operating layer. India’s cloud computing market is estimated to be worth over USD 15–20 billion today and is expected to grow several-fold over the next decade as enterprises accelerate digital adoption.
The question enterprises are now facing is not whether to be on the cloud, but what to do with the cloud they already have.
The first wave of enterprise cloud in India was migration-led. Speed was the currency. Cloud service providers and systems integrators built their entire go-to-market around one motion: assess, migrate, move on. What this wave got right was infrastructure modernisation. Less attention, however, was given to the operational complexities that follow large-scale migration. Cloud infrastructure does not sit passively once deployed. It expands, fragments, and generates costs daily. Many enterprises discovered that workloads were migrated, but governance frameworks were not built in parallel. Costs scaled faster than visibility.
The migration chapter is largely closed. The operational chapter is only just beginning. Cloud changed the financial structure of enterprise IT. The shift from capital expenditure to consumption-based operating expenditure brought flexibility, but also a kind of financial exposure most finance teams were not prepared for. Globally, 84 percent of organisations now identify managing cloud spend as their single biggest operational challenge, with cloud budgets being exceeded by an average of 17 percent. Industry research consistently points to 27 to 32 percent of enterprise cloud spending being wasted, primarily due to idle resources, over- provisioned compute, and poor utilisation discipline.
The sources of waste are rarely dramatic. They include over-provisioned compute from migration phases that were never right-sized after go-live, development environments duplicated and never decommissioned, inactive data sitting in high-performance storage tiers and egress charges accumulating as applications exchange data across regions.
A 2024 industry survey found that over three-quarters of enterprise respondents estimated between 21 and 50 percent of their cloud spend was being wasted. This often results in a mismatch between provisioned capacity and actual utilisation. Most large Indian enterprises are not operating a single cloud. Hybrid and multi-cloud architectures have become the dominant model. Nearly ninety percent of organisations now run hybrid cloud strategies, with data spread across at least one public and one private environment, and the average enterprise works across 2.4 public cloud providers simultaneously.
The challenge is that running multiple environments creates fragmented visibility. Each provider operates with its own pricing model, monitoring tools, and compliance frameworks. A CIO managing infrastructure across three or four environments is reconciling different billing structures and enforcing governance policies that were not designed to work together. Governance gaps and lack of expertise remain top challenges for 90 percent of organisations globally.
In many cases, governance frameworks are still evolving to match the complexity of multi-environment operations. The emerging demand from enterprise IT and finance leadership is centred on governance, cost predictability, and operational discipline. FinOps has emerged as a consequential framework in this context, bringing finance, engineering, and operations teams into shared accountability for cloud consumption. Adoption is accelerating, with nearly half of organisations now operating a dedicated FinOps function, reflecting the growing need to align cloud usage with financial accountability.
Data sovereignty is also becoming a board-level decision. As India’s regulatory environment around data governance matures, the question of where data lives shapes infrastructure strategy in ways that go well beyond technology choices. And automation is fast becoming non-negotiable. Cloud environments at scale cannot be governed manually. AI-driven systems that monitor usage patterns, flag inefficiencies, and rebalance workloads across platforms are moving from nice-to-have to operationally essential.
India’s cloud market is on a strong growth trajectory. But growth figures alone obscure what is happening inside enterprises. The real story of Indian cloud today is not about how much infrastructure is being provisioned. It is about how effectively that infrastructure is being run.
What enterprises increasingly need from their cloud partners is not another migration pitch. They need operational partners willing to take accountability for outcomes well beyond go-live. Organisations that learn to govern what they have built will extract more value from their cloud investments than those that simply keep building.
If the initial phase of cloud in India was defined by scale, the next phase is likely to be shaped by discipline and accountability.