Mumbai, Feb 2 (IANS): Driven by Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), the public cloud services market in India is projected to grow 38 per cent in 2017 to reach $1.81 billion, market research firm Gartner predicted on Thursday.

The highest growth will continue to be driven by IaaS which is projected to grow at 49.2 per cent in 2017, followed by 33 per cent in software-as-a-service (SaaS) and 32.1 per cent in platform-as-a-service (PaaS), Gartner said.

The increase of SaaS and PaaS indicates that the migration of application and workloads from on-premises data centres to the cloud, as well as the development of cloud ready and cloud native applications, are fuelling the growth in the cloud space.

"We see increased cloud growth in the infrastructure compute services space as adoption becomes increasingly mainstream," Sid Nag, Research Director at Gartner, said in a statement.

"This has been predicted for a while, and the momentum continues to sustain in 2017 eventually plateauing through 2020 as the market further matures," Nag added.