End-user spending on public cloud services in India will total $4.4 billion in 2021, as per the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc. This will be 31.4% higher as compared to 2020.

“Indian CIOs saw the benefits of cloud during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020,” stated Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “To build business resilience and minimize the impact of continued disruptions, investing in cloud is unavoidable. India has experienced consistent double-digit growth in cloud spending over the last three years, the pandemic only expedited the shift.”

Software-as-a-Service (Saas) and cloud management and security services will all show double-digit growth in India for the first time. As people continue to work remotely in 2021, this will lead to an increase in desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) spends. These segments are forecast to grow 47.7% and 52.2%, respectively.

“SaaS has been pivotal in supporting the sudden increase in the mobile workforce, as well as customers, in 2020,” stated Nag.

Within SaaS, customer experience and relationship management and content services will be the highest growing segments in 2021, forecast to grow 24.9% and 26.1%, respectively. In 2020, spending on e-mail and authoring declined 0.2%, however, this trend will reverse in 2021.

E-mail and authoring is expected to grow 25.1% this year. With the increase in remote workers by organizations due to the pandemic, more business is being conducted using email and collaboration tools, which will drive the growth of these services.