Increased demand for cloud professionals expected to reach 2 million by 2025 in India, Nasscom reports

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) has reported that the demand for cloud technology professionals in India is expected to reach 2 million by 2025.

The report, written in association with Draup, Tata Consultancy Services and Accenture, found that India ranked third with 608,000 cloud professionals across all verticals including technology as of FY2021.

Titled “Cloud Skills: Powering India’s Digital DNA”, the report states that the demand for cloud solutions is growing both in India and worldwide, leading to a higher demand for talent. In India alone, there were 308,000 job openings in cloud in 2020, up 40% from 2019.

Significant demand in job roles in cloud covers many areas such as native application development, network virtualisation, containerisation, and services architecture. Over the past year, with increased working from home, security is proving essential in cloud and specialised skills in cloud security, security standardisation, SASE platforms, identity and access management, and data encryption are seeking greater demand as well.

India’s cloud talent pool is expected to grow 2.4 times and reach just below 1.5 million by 2025. This means that the need to scale talent further is a matter of urgency so that demand can be met. The report estimates that with a more intense talent building roadmap, India can increase its cloud talent pool to 1.7-1.8 million and become the world’s second largest cloud talent hub.

With this, upskilling is essential within the pool of current employed cloud professionals and, also, recruiting new talent from universities. Employees in traditional software engineering, IT and networking, cybersecurity, data engineering are likely to be targeted for upskilling due to higher skill overlap.

Nasscom plans to work with stakeholders to realise their vision to make India a global hub for digital talent, which will require concentrated efforts from industry, government, and academia to develop effective talent development roadmaps.

Gartner reported that worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is predicted to grow at 20 % on an annual basis by 2022, reaching $398 billion. India’s cloud market is expected to grow to $5.6 billion by 2022, a 26% year-on-year growth.

Additionally, Nasscom’s Future of Technology Services-Winning in this Decade report forecasts the global cloud opportunity to reach $800 billion in 2025 and India is predicted to take a large share of this market.