Driven by the ongoing digital initiatives by the Indian government and a surge in the use of digital technologies due to COVID-19, more than 50% of enterprises in India have significantly increased their ICT budget in 2022 compared to 2021, reveals GlobalData.
GlobalData’s India enterprise ICT investment trends report, which is based on the company’s recent ICT Customer Insight Survey, about 56% of the respondents who are key IT decision-makers in enterprises covered in the survey for the country, have claimed that there has been a significant (greater than 6%) increase in their enterprise ICT budget for 2022 compared to 2021 while another 34.5% have claimed there has been a slight (1% to 6%) increase in the same.
“The optimistic enterprise ICT spending outlook in India for 2022 can most likely be attributed to the growing focus on technology-led investment towards Digital Transformation activities like cloud migration, automation and upgrading of legacy IT infrastructure along with favourable government policies,” said Pragyan Tarasia, Technology Analyst at GlobalData. “Furthermore, large-scale enterprises and SMEs across India are progressively changing their business models to deliver digital-first experience.”
The report also analyses the enterprise investment priorities across 30 plus IT solution areas and reveals that cloud computing is one of the top investment areas for 2022. Cloud computing is becoming an integral part of enterprises across all sectors in India including BFSI, retail, healthcare, education, and telecom, as it builds business resilience, accelerates innovation and optimises costs.
As a result, enterprises in India are prioritizing their investment on cloud computing implementation models. This is validated in the GlobalData’s survey, where more than 65% of the surveyed respondents have claimed that their individual private cloud, hybrid cloud, Managed Cloud Services, IaaS, SaaS and PaaS budget allocation towards cloud computing has increased in 2022 compared with 2021.
“The thrust towards Digital India by the Government of India to support eGovernance initiatives and think-tank Niti Aayog’s vision of AI-led economy is also one of the key reasons for an increased focus on cloud computing among enterprises in India,” added Tarasia. “As the demand for cloud computing grows, government initiatives such as the acceleration of e-services delivery through GI Cloud (MeghRaj) and the development of a cloud-based AI platform, called AIRAWAT, are facilitating cloud boom in the country. Moreover, with cloud computing becoming the launchpad for Digital Transformation, enterprises are investing on cloud infrastructure for faster access to technologies, efficient application development and secured business.”
However, with the growing digitization of businesses cybersecurity has also become a critical enterprise concern, thus stimulating increased investment in IT security hardware, software and services for the next two years.
For instance, more than 80% of respondents in India have claimed that their enterprises are prioritising their ICT investment in identity and access management, data protection/security, fraud prevention and transactional security and security intelligence and management software for investment in next two years.