Cloud is becoming the operating system of the modern enterprise
By Piyush Prakashchandra Somani, Promoter, Managing Director and Chairman, ESDS
For decades, enterprise technology strategy revolved around managing on-premise infrastructure. That model is rapidly changing. The pace of cloud adoption in India is particularly striking. Between 2020 and 2024, India’s public cloud market grew at a 31.9% compound annual growth rate, significantly faster than the global average of 22.3%, according to Asian Development Bank and Nexdigm industry analysis. This growth reflects a broader shift in enterprise priorities. organisations increasingly view cloud platforms not simply as a storage solution, but as the foundation for innovation in artificial intelligence, analytics, and digital services.
The economic impact is also substantial. Several factors are driving this momentum. First, the scale of India’s digital population has created enormous data generation. Second, businesses are under pressure to modernize legacy systems in order to compete in increasingly digital markets. Third, government initiatives such as Digital India and the MeghRaj cloud program are accelerating cloud adoption across the public sector. Another important trend is the shift toward multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures. Rather than relying on a single provider, enterprises are deploying workloads across multiple cloud environments to improve flexibility, resilience, and regulatory compliance.
As organisations scale digital services from fintech platforms to e-commerce ecosystems, the cloud is increasingly becoming the backbone of business operations.The strategic conversation around cloud is therefore evolving. It is no longer about whether companies should move to the cloud. The question now is how quickly organisations can redesign their technology architectures around cloud-native models.
For India’s enterprises, cloud computing is rapidly becoming what operating systems once were for personal computers: the invisible infrastructure that powers the entire digital ecosystem.