Cloud infrastructure as a service to exceed data centre outsourcing costs in India in 2017: Gartner

Cloud infrastructure as a service will exceed traditional data centre outsourcing spending in India, which is forecast to reach $677 million in 2017, compared to $559 million for traditional data centres at present.

According to a study by Gartner,by 2021, cloud computing and storage as a service will be nearly three times that of traditional data centre outsourcing in terms of spending in India.

"As the demand for agility and flexibility grows, organisations will shift toward more industrialised, less-tailored options," said DD Mishra, research director at Gartner.

"Organisations that adopt hybrid infrastructure will optimise costs and increase efficiency.

However, it increases the complexity of selecting the right toolset to deliver end-to-end services in a multi-sourced environment."

Gartner predicts that by 2020, 90 per cent of organisations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities.

In 2016, traditional worldwide data centre outsourcing (DCO) and infrastructure utility services (IUS) together represented 36.5 per cent of the $1.65 billion total data centre services (DCS) market in India. This is expected to tilt further toward cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and hosting, and by 2021, DCO /IUS will be about 22 per cent of the expected $3.8 billion DCS market in India.

By 2021, the cloud IaaS market in India will exceed $2.1 billion in end-user spending, which will be nearly three times that of traditional DCO in India. End-user spending of traditional DCO in India will reach $693 million in 2021, and it will represent more than half the overall DCS spending of about $3.8 billion.

"This means that by 2021 traditional data centre services will co-exist with a minority share alongside the industrialised and digitalised services," said Mishra.

Through 2020, integrated systems in India will shave off up to 25 per cent of the combined spend on servers and storage.

Gartner's interactions with end-user organisations in India reflect a strong willingness to consider alternate delivery models for infrastructure requirements. Users are keen to understand newer technologies such as integrated systems and hyperconverged infrastructures, as well as cloud-based architectures.

A bigger focus on cloud, mobility and analytics has led to many organisations to rethink their data centre strategies.

Organisations in India are increasingly challenging the need to buy and maintain discrete data centre components, and are also evaluating architectures that would provide the agility, flexibility and the scale desired for new application workloads.

At the same time, users now have a greater choice and availability of newer technologies, such as hyper-converged infrastructures.