Mumbai, Nov 3 (IANS): Public Cloud adoption has accelerated since the onset of the pandemic and in India, the end-user spending on public cloud services is likely to reach $7.3 billion in 2022, an increase of 29.6 per cent from 2021, a new report revealed on Wednesday.

While still on the rise, Indian end-user spending on Public Cloud next year will be slower than the 34.6 per cent growth forecast in 2021, according to Gartner.

Indian CIOs are expected to focus their cloud investment on cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS).

This segment is forecast to total $2.4 billion in 2022, up 40 per cent from 2021.

IaaS will make up 32.3 per cent of the total investments in public cloud services in 2022.

"In India, policy infrastructure is emerging as an important contributor to Public Cloud growth," said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner.

For example, the recently-launched Public Cloud government initiatives "will prove useful for small and medium businesses or those who are in the early stage of cloud adoption to benefit from this technology", he said in a statement.

Public Cloud growth continues to be driven by organisations that want to modernise their IT and reduce their capital expenditure spend.

"The next step in the growth of Cloud in India will be the adoption of cloud native technologies. Indian CIOs will look to reimagine and refashion their applications and workloads using containers and microservices as well as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)," Nag explained.