Bangalore, September 21, 201: A study by market research and advisory firm Current Analysis,  suggests that 68 percent of enterprises in India, with 100-plus employees, are using Cloud-based services, while the remaining 32 percent plan to do so over the next 24 months. This is a number that matches North America says the study that spanned in 19 countries across four key regions globally.
This is also  in line with trends in the larger Asia Pacific market where the adoption of Cloud-based services is as high as 65 percent.
“India is fast emerging as a high-growth market for Cloud services, led thus far by the private Cloud segment. However, there is huge potential for adoption of public Cloud services, which are in their early stages of market development and would need greater thrust from players such as IBM SoftLayer, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google, NTT Communications and Rackspace, to win enterprise trust and confidence for moving their workloads on the public Cloud,” said Harish Taori, Research Director for the Asia Pacific region at Current Analysis.
The study also finds that the scale of Cloud services adoption easily surpasses those of other new-generation ICT services including Big Data and Enterprise Mobility. While a significant 39 percent of the respondents ranked Cloud as their no. 1 investment priority in India, 16 percent said it would be Big Data while 12 percent favoured Enterprise Mobility. Network Security jointly ranked as the no. 2 investment priority, along with Big Data.
“It is  notable that Cloud has emerged as a leading investment priority for Indian enterprises, surpassing even Network Security investments. However, this certainly doesn’t amount to the ICT decision makers lowering their guards when it comes to the all-vital area of IT security. It is just that they have gotten comfortable with the private clouds set up by their long-standing IT service partners like TCS, IBM, HP, Wipro and Tech Mahindra, among others,” said Deepak Kumar, Principal Analyst, APAC, Current Analysis.
That also explains why Indian enterprises favoured IT service players over public cloud players when it came to choosing partners for the deployment of Cloud, Big Data, Network Security, Enterprise Mobility and other such solutions. 
This information is based on Current Analysis’ new study: Enterprise ICT Investment Insights Study 2014.