India will Need 20 Lakh Cloud Professionals by 2025: Nasscom

India is likely to see demand for cloud professionals to touch 20 lakh by 2025, as the need for businesses to migrate critical workloads to Cloud and modernize legacy on-premise IT infrastructure has been accelerating growth in cloud adoption in the country, as per the recent study from Nasscom.

Nasscom, in association with Draup, said in the report that India currently ranks third globally with an installed talent pool of 608,000 (FY2021) cloud professionals.

“By 2025, India would have an estimated 14-15 lakh cloud professionals (baseline growth). However, with an estimated demand for over 2 million professionals by 2025, India could reach 17-18 lakh cloud talent pool with a fairly aggressive skilling roadmap,” the report titled ‘Cloud Skills: Powering India’s Digital DNA’ said.

India’s cloud market is estimated to reach USD 5.6 billion by 2022, a 26 per cent year-on-year growth.

With rapid digital acceleration and everything becoming on-demand and need-based, migration to cloud-based services will provide a significant competitive advantage for SMEs and enterprises in the new normal.

This is further expected to grow exponentially with accelerated cloud adoption across sectors. Infrastructural agility, flexibility, and resilience on cloud with significantly lower costs, especially post the pandemic, have been the key growth drivers for such a shift, the report said.

The Indian SaaS (software as a service) startup ecosystem is another driver of cloud demand, it added.

SaaS companies in India employ over 40,000 professionals across job domains, more than any other tech startup segment, Nasscom said. With a baseline growth of 24 per cent CAGR, India’s cloud talent pool is expected to grow 2.4X to nearly 1.5 million by 2025.

However, there is an urgent need to scale talent further — talent with the right skill-sets — that will help meet this demand, it said.

The report estimates that with a more aggressive talent building roadmap (30 per cent-plus growth rate), India can increase its cloud talent pool to between 1.7 to 1.8 million and in the process, become world’s second largest cloud talent hub.

India saw about 380,000 job openings for cloud roles in 2020, a 40 per cent growth over 2019. The demand for cloud skills far outweighs the current supply and needs focus across stakeholders on upskilling, it added.