New Delhi, Jun 6 (IANS): The Indian Public Cloud services market revenue reached $3.6 billion for 2020 and is set to reach $9.5 billion by 2025, grow at a CAGR of 21.5 per cent, according to a new IDC report.

For the second half of 2020, the Indian public cloud services market totalled $1.9 billion, according to according to IDC's ‘Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker'.

The Public Cloud services market includes infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions and software-as-a-service (SaaS).

"Public clouds played a critical role for organisations in 2020, driven by business continuity, flexibility and agility. Cloud will become crucial as organisations expedite the development process and deployment of business applications to meet the changing work and business environment," said Rishu Sharma, Principal Analyst, Cloud and Artificial Intelligence, IDC India.

SaaS continued to be the largest component of the overall public cloud services market, followed by IaaS and PaaS last year.

The spending continues to accelerate, with the top two service providers holding 49 per cent of the Indian public cloud services market for 2020.

Even though enterprises in the country have been discussing cloud adoption for the past few years, the Covid-19 pandemic forced enterprises to expedite their cloud strategy.

"This accelerated cloud adoption in the country by several years. Businesses started adopting cloud to host a wide array of applications ranging from email servers to many complex systems like data warehousing, advanced analytics, etc," said Harish Krishnakumar, Senior Market Analyst, IDC India.

There was also an increased migration of enterprise applications to the cloud.

"Moreover, the remote working induced by the pandemic propelled the demand for remote storage capabilities and also resulted in increased adoption of cloud-based collaboration tools, VDI applications, etc," Krishnakumar added.

The pandemic continued to be the key driver of cloud adoption as enterprises continued their investments in cloud infrastructure, platforms, and software to improve the resiliency of their business operations and equip themselves to tackle successive waves of the pandemic.

As business objectives aim at gaining resiliency, IDC expects cloud adoption to be further accelerated for rapid digital innovation.