In India, businesses have considered cloud adoption a technology priority, but the pandemic has created a perfect storm of digitization across the country. We are seeing reinvention cross almost every industry due to cloud. This is not surprising given that evidence suggests that cloud adoption boosts an organization's ability to innovate, re-imagine customer experiences, and make high velocity decisions in an increasingly dynamic world.

The India opportunity

India is projected to become the world’s third largest economy by 2030, with 776 million internet users, 75 million Small and Medium business (SMBs), 5 million+ developers, 59 thousand start-ups, 1200 listed enterprises, and 1300 global development centers. India is also becoming a home for SaaS businesses; the Indian SaaS ecosystem is now the third largest in the world and is expected to fulfill 11% of the global SaaS demand by 2025, as per a Chiratae-Zinnov Study.

At AWS, we are committed to bringing the power of cloud directly into the hands of customers and partners, so they have the tools they need to deliver citizen impact at scale. We are taking a two-pronged approach - empowering the ecosystem while also building a formidable skilled talent pool in India.

We’re proud to play a role in enabling this through several initiatives, whether it is promoting and nurturing a new innovative and inclusive India through mobile innovation coaches, or programs that help women explore opportunities in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), or scaling training and certification programs to address the cloud skills gap in India.

Empowering the ecosystem

India has one of the largest startup ecosystems globally. In 2021 alone, India has added 42 Unicorns valued at $82.1 billion, according to Government sources. We are seeing tremendous growth and a new generation of ‘Digital SMBs’ who are embracing mobile first solutions, improving discoverability online, embracing e-commerce, and looking at machine learning, IoT, and data analytics like never before.

It will be exciting to see the impact of democratization and simplification of technology for Indian businesses in 2022 and beyond. This will enable large-scale migration and modernization, allowing organisations to build apps on the cloud, giving them agility, improved cost structure, scalability, and innovation.

Skilling a cloud-ready workforce

As businesses innovate and disrupt their existing business models, this shift requires a generation of digitally skilled workers who can take advantage of the flexibility, agility, and scale that cloud computing offers. Most organizations have less than 10% of their employees trained with cloud skills, as the IDC Cloud Skills Market reports. The skills shortage can pose challenges given that an AWS commissioned report by AlphaBeta suggests that the average worker in India will need to develop seven new digital skills by 2025 to keep pace with technology advancements and demands.

New survey of digital workers reveals cloud architecture design, cybersecurity, and large-scale data modeling are among the top in-demandskills in India.

AWS is collaborating with NASSCOM FutureSkills Prime to skill India’s digital talent in cloud computing. Programs such as AWS Educate, which provides access to content developed to skill up for cloud careers, and AWS Academy, which provides higher education institutions with a free, ready-to-teach cloud computing curriculum are important. Similarly, AWS re/Start, a full-time, classroom-based skills development and training program for careers in the cloud, and numerous AWS certifications that validate cloud expertise also play a role in furthering this objective.

While India is investing heavily in education to keep up with the accelerating need for qualified workers to support its growth, there remains a skills gap in the country’s digital workforce.

The challenge goes beyond technology and the skills, however. Nurturing a mindset of innovation and experimenting by modeling the right organizational culture is a key step in this journey.

In the 15 years since AWS pioneered cloud technology, it has evolved to enable sophisticated and complex applications. As the journey continues, 2022 promises to be an exciting year for technology for India and the world at large, with innovations that we haven’t imagined yet.