This article is based on reporting originally published by The Hindu BusinessLine, drawing on a 2018 report by ed-tech platform Great Learning, which surveyed senior cloud experts, recruiting managers, and subject-matter experts, supplemented by third-party industry research.
The Cloud Hiring Boom in India
As of late 2018, cloud computing was reshaping hiring priorities across Indian IT. A report by executive ed-tech platform Great Learning projected that more than one million new cloud computing jobs would be created in India by 2022, driven by accelerating enterprise adoption across both large and small organisations.
The same report noted that at that time approximately 1.7 million cloud roles worldwide remained unfilled, as technical recruiters struggled to find qualified candidates—a structural skills gap that made cloud expertise particularly valuable.
India’s Cloud Market Size and Growth
The Indian cloud computing market was valued at approximately $2.2 billion in 2018, with projections targeting $4 billion by 2020—an annual growth rate exceeding 30 percent. This growth was attributed to several converging factors:
- Rapid expansion of cloud-native services and managed offerings
- Growing enterprise confidence in the security of public and hybrid cloud environments
- Cost pressures pushing organisations away from on-premises data centres
- Demand for greater flexibility, scalability, and deployment speed
IT companies in India were increasingly building new solutions on cloud infrastructure rather than physical hardware, reflecting a broader global shift in how IT capacity is provisioned and consumed.
Cloud Spending Versus Traditional IT
According to the Great Learning report, companies in 2018 were investing at 4.5 times the rate of traditional IT spending when it came to cloud infrastructure, with that gap expected to widen further toward 2020. The report also noted a structural shift on the horizon: virtually all future IT expenditure was expected to target private, public, or hybrid cloud environments—making cloud literacy a baseline requirement for most IT roles, not just specialist ones.
Global Cloud Job Market
Globally, the report cited approximately 18 million cloud computing jobs at the time of publication, with the global median salary for cloud professionals exceeding $100,000 per year. Experienced specialists at the top of the market—cloud architects and senior engineers—commanded salaries as high as $280,000 per year in some markets.
More than two-thirds of global enterprises were reported to be planning, actively implementing, or already using cloud computing, and over half of businesses identified cloud as a high strategic priority.
Cloud Salaries in India (2018 Benchmarks)
The report provided a salary breakdown for cloud professionals in India at the time, illustrating the premium that cloud skills commanded over traditional IT roles:
| Experience Level | Estimated Annual Salary (INR) |
|---|---|
| Entry-level (0–2 years) | ₹5–7 lakh |
| Associate (up to 5 years) | ₹12–19 lakh |
| Mid-level manager | ₹20 lakh+ |
| Cloud architect / specialist (10–15 years) | ₹30 lakh+ |
For context, a traditional IT engineer with comparable entry-level experience was earning approximately ₹3–5 lakh per year at the same time—making cloud-specialised roles noticeably more lucrative from the start of a career.
The Cloud Skills Gap
One of the report’s key findings was that the skills gap in cloud is qualitatively different from historical IT talent shortages. Cloud computing demands a combination of skills that had not previously existed as a coherent discipline: distributed systems design, infrastructure-as-code, identity and access management, cost optimisation, and cloud-native security—capabilities that traditional IT training pipelines were not producing at scale.
This mismatch between enterprise demand and available talent was creating significant recruiting friction, with 1.7 million roles unfilled globally at the time of the report.
Context and Takeaways for DevOps Professionals
While this report was published in 2018 and its specific projections now refer to a period that has passed, the underlying dynamics it described have continued to play out. Cloud adoption has accelerated further, particularly following the 2020 shift to remote work, and the demand for engineers who understand cloud platforms, DevOps tooling, and infrastructure automation remains strong.
For engineers looking to position themselves for this market, the priorities identified in the report remain relevant: develop platform-specific expertise (AWS, Azure, GCP), invest in infrastructure-as-code skills (Terraform, Pulumi), and understand cloud-native security and cost governance.
Source: The Hindu BusinessLine, reporting on a Great Learning industry report, November 2018.