India will need 20 lakh Cloud professionals by 2025: Nasscom

New Delhi, Aug 23 : India is likely to see demand for Cloud professionals to touch 20 lakh by 2025, as the need for businesses to migrate critical workloads to Cloud and modernise legacy on-premise IT infrastructure, especially post the pandemic, has been accelerating growth in cloud adoption in the country, a Nasscom study showed on Monday.

By 2025, India would have an estimated 14 to 15 lakh cloud professionals.

However, with an estimated demand for over 20 lakh professionals by 2025, India could reach 17-18 lakh cloud talent pool with a fairly aggressive skilling roadmap, said the report, titled ‘Cloud Skills: Powering India's Digital DNA.'

Currently, India ranks 3rd globally with an installed talent pool of 608,000 (FY2021) cloud professionals.

"For India to carve itself a unique identity as a global hub for cloud solutions, a concentrated public-private partnership, and large-scale skilling is the key," said Debjani Ghosh, President, Nasscom.

"Nasscom has set up its FutureSkills PRIME initiative in partnership with MeitY to upskill talent in emerging technologies and cloud skills are a key area of focus on this platfor," she added.

According to the report, India has the required ecosystem to take a big share of this market and be seen as the cloud solutions hub for the world.

However, for this dream to materialize, India must get its cloud skills stack right.

"India has the potential to become the world's 2nd largest cloud talent hub with the combined effort of government bodies, education and skilling organisations and technology providers," it mentioned.

With rapid digital acceleration and everything becoming on-demand and need-based, migration to cloud-based services will provide a significant competitive advantage for SMEs and enterprises in the new normal.

This is further expected to grow exponentially with accelerated cloud adoption across sectors. Infrastructural agility, flexibility, and resilience on Cloud with significantly lower costs, especially post the pandemic has been the key growth drivers for such a shift, the report added.

With a baseline growth of 24 per cent CAGR, India's cloud talent pool is expected to grow 2.4X to nearly 1.5 million by 2025.

To bridge the demand-supply gap, skilling at scale needs to be the topmost priority.

"India is well placed to do this by tapping into the adjacent pool of installed base and also by targeting fresh talent from universities," the report said.