Subram Natarajan, Chief Technology Officer, IBM India/South Asia

The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that to operate effectively in the presence of an unanticipated crisis, organizations need to be agile, robust, and secure. This has led to an acceleration in the adoption of hybrid cloud technology and services in 2020, allowing organizations to run workloads on-premises, in the private cloud, and the public cloud.

As we enter 2021, where hybrid ways of working may be the new normal, not only will organizations continue to focus on ensuring they make the right technology choices, they will adopt a holistic, hybrid multicloud architecture, allowing them to easily build and modernize applications and make their data ready for their journey to AI across the company. A recent IBM study highlighted that organizations in India will increase their share of spend on hybrid cloud, from the current 17 percent to about 49 percent by 2023.  This represents nearly half of their cloud budget on hybrid over the next three years. Further, the public cloud spend will reduce from 50 percent share now to 43 percent by 2023. Also, Indian organizations expect to be using an average of 10 clouds, however, only 29 percent of businesses have holistic multi-cloud management strategies in place - by 2023.

Disruptions are redefining business as usual, increasing demand for new digital capabilities and services, fuelled by changing customers and employee’s needs. This is driving the rapid evolution of technology and operations to improve business agility and manage long-term strategy. With pandemic accelerating the adoption of hybrid cloud, companies are turning to initiatives like application modernization, process automation, and AI infusion to derive insights that can deliver scalable, and secure digital services as per customer’s and employee’s need. A hybrid cloud platform approach delivers 2.5 times more value than a traditional, public cloud-only approach.

The next chapter of the cloud demands the power to quickly innovate and respond to changing market and client demands- build once and deploy anywhere. With cloud investment being key, we will witness six major technology priorities enabled by cloud in 2021.