According to Gartner Inc, the public cloud services market in India is projected to grow 38 percent in 2017 to a total of $1.81 billion. The Cloud Services in India will continue through the next couple of years until 2019, when the market is slated to be valued at $1.9 billion. The SMB market is seeing a CAGR of about 15 percent YoY and this growth is expected to propel the IT spend to cross 18.5 billion by FY2018 (Gartner report).

The considerable growth of IaaS and SaaS in the India market is indicative of that fact that enterprises in India are moving away from building their own on premises infrastructure, as well as migrating from the traditional software licensing model, to a SaaS model served up by cloud providers.

Tipping the scales for ‘Public Cloud Strategies’
When it was first launched, one of the most highly-anticipated benefits of the public cloud was its fulfilment of businesses’ desire to move away from CAPEX to OPEX models. The increasing run-rates over time, however, add up to a recipe that just doesn’t work for all workloads, particularly those that are more predictable and can be easily run on-premises. Aside from bill shock, another common grievance with the

public cloud is ‘lock-in’ rules. When 'data gravity' sets in and partners and customers realize they might have too much happening in the public cloud and the rising costs that go with it, they’re often met with unexpected costs when they try to move anything back.

Another big concern with the public cloud is security. Since the cloud allows for the storage and access of information by many different persons, the nature of the data content proves to be a matter of concern. This session will thus consider the nature of data monitoring systems currently instituted by the intermediaries and whether these are effective. The issue of possible threats to data ownership and intellectual property rights as well as the security concerns related to the storage of sensitive data.

As the public cloud continues to grow, companies need to realize its limitations and risks, and find a balance that allows them to make their infrastructure work for them

Hybrid Cloud Offering the Best of Both Worlds
The public cloud will continue to grow despite the decline in strategies. But the answer here is the hybrid cloud which is still in the development process. What we need is hybrid cloud - not as it is known now – but hybrid cloud that really works and creates the right balance between public cloud and modern on-premises solutions like hyper converged infrastructure and enterprise cloud.

With hybrid cloud, we’ll get the best of both worlds - the speed and elasticity of the public cloud, perfect for businesses launching new digital services where they're unsure of the initial impact they will have on IT resources, and the cost-predictive, open, governance-considerate nature of modern, in-house, enterprise clouds.

We’re starting to see signs of this becoming reality in 2017 - public cloud providers are pushing a hybrid cloud message and collaborating with the ‘other side’ to create real hybrid options. As the public cloud continues to grow, companies need to realize its limitations and risks, and find a balance that allows them to make their infrastructure work for them, and enables them to take full advantage of the business value technology can bring from 2018 and onwards.