BENGALURU: Now, businesses are showing growing interest in cloud spending, as 81% of Indian micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) plan to increase their cloud spend in 2025.
Zoho in its recent survey found that businesses indicated that as they scale, by 2026, they want to invest in digital solutions for customer relationship management (CRM), and IT infrastructure management.
MSMEs’ spending on IT and cloud is on the rise: As the focus of MSMEs on DX (digital transformation) becomes stronger, and they aim to improve their growth prospects they bank on IT and cloud solutions. About 97% of the respondents allocate up to 20% of their revenue to their IT and cloud needs.
The survey found that as businesses scale and their operations grow or become complex in nature, their digital needs also tend to grow. While 49% of the micro enterprises said they would like to reduce their cloud spending next year, 44% of medium-sized enterprises stated that they want to increase their cloud spend for 2025.
Recently, Gartner said while cloud infrastructure and platform services are driving the highest spending growth, SaaS remains the largest segment of the cloud market in end-user spending. SaaS (software as a service) spending is projected to grow 20% to total $247.2 billion in 2024. Public cloud infrastructure is a large driver of IT spending. Of many benefits of cloud, significant advantages include scalability, cost factor and enhanced security and compliance.
To understand the current environment within the sector, Zoho’s survey explored the sentiment of businesses pertaining to growth; 73% of the respondents claimed that they were optimistic about their growth in the next six months. The businesses are, however, concerned about three aspects of the current macroeconomic landscape, which are economic uncertainty (54%), inflation (44%), and a shortage of skilled labour (33%).
MSMEs adopt cloud solutions in order to achieve operational efficiency. Among the surveyed MSMEs that plan their IT spends (98%), 77% have allocated up to 50% of their 2024 budget towards cloud solutions, 23% of businesses have allocated more than 50% of their budget for the same.