End-user spending on public cloud services in India is expected to touch USD 4.4 billion in 2021, an increase of 31.4 percent over the previous year, according to research firm Gartner.

This is expected to grow further to USD 5.62 billion in 2022, Gartner said in a statement.

The continued trend of increased remote workers in 2021, will lead to an increase in spending on desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

These segments are forecast to grow 47.7 percent (to USD 73 million) and 52.2 percent (to USD 1.44 billion), respectively.

Indian chief information officers (CIOs) saw the benefits of cloud during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, Gartner research vice president Sid Nag said.

“To build business resilience and minimize the impact of continued disruptions, investing in the cloud is unavoidable. India has experienced consistent double-digit growth in cloud spending over the last three years, the pandemic only expedited the shift,” he added.

Spending on Cloud Business Process Services (BPaaS) is expected to grow 9.2 percent to USD 207 million, Cloud Application Infrastructure Services (PaaS) by 30.5 percent to USD 997 million, Cloud Application Services (SaaS) by 20.8 percent to USD 1.41 billion, and Cloud Management and Security Services by 18 percent to USD 317 million in 2021.

Gartner said spending on SaaS and cloud management and security services will experience double-digit growth in India for the first time.

“SaaS has been pivotal in supporting the sudden increase in the mobile workforce, as well as customers, in 2020. Learning from this, Indian CIOs will continue to build on the above trend as they move towards a composable business environment,” Nag said.

Within SaaS, customer experience and relationship management and content services will be the highest growing segments in 2021, forecast to grow 24.9 percent and 26.1 percent, respectively, as per Gartner.

In 2020, spending on e-mail and authoring declined 0.2 percent but this trend will reverse in 2021, it added. E-mail and authoring are expected to grow 25.1 percent this year.

With the increase in remote workers by organizations due to the pandemic, more business is being conducted using email and collaboration tools, which will drive the growth of these services, it said.