India's public cloud market reached $9.2 billion in 2024 and is forecast to cross $24 billion by 2028, growing at approximately 24% annually according to Gartner. AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have all made significant India-specific infrastructure investments — AWS launched its second India region in Hyderabad in 2022, Azure operates regions in Pune and Chennai, and Google Cloud's Mumbai region serves as a major Southeast Asia hub.

The adoption numbers are impressive. What is less impressive is how that cloud capacity is being used. A 2025 McKinsey analysis of enterprise cloud deployments across Asia found that 65% of cloud spending was on workloads that had been "lifted and shifted" — moved from on-premises data centres to cloud virtual machines with no architectural change.

These deployments capture some of cloud's benefits — reduced hardware capital expenditure, improved geographic redundancy — but miss the transformational ones: elastic scaling, consumption-based pricing, and access to cloud-native services like managed databases, serverless compute, and AI/ML APIs. Flexera's 2025 State of the Cloud report found that the average enterprise wastes 28% of its cloud spend on unused or idle resources — a figure that translates to hundreds of crore annually for large Indian enterprise cloud deployments.

The most sophisticated cloud-native organisations — the Flipkarts, Nykaas, and Razorpays of the Indian ecosystem — design applications specifically for cloud: stateless services that scale horizontally, managed databases that handle replication automatically, event-driven architectures that cost nothing when idle and scale instantly when demand spikes.