NASSCOM's most recent skills report estimates that cloud computing now accounts for roughly 34% of all new IT job requirements posted in India, up from about 21% in 2022. That's a meaningful jump in a short window, and it reflects something broader than a single hot skill — it's a sign that cloud literacy has moved from a specialization a subset of engineers held to a baseline expectation across a much larger share of technical roles.

Why the share has grown this fast

A few forces are compounding at once. Indian enterprises across banking, retail, and manufacturing have continued migrating workloads off on-premise infrastructure. Startups default to cloud-native architecture from day one rather than building their own data centers. And the current wave of AI adoption — training and running models, standing up agentic workflows, managing vector databases — runs almost entirely on cloud infrastructure, which pulls cloud skills into job descriptions that wouldn't have needed them five years ago, including plenty of roles that aren't "cloud engineer" by title.

AWS, Azure, or both?

The market split isn't uniform across industries. AWS has historically held the largest share of cloud infrastructure in India and tends to dominate in startups and digital-native companies, in part simply because it had the earliest and widest footprint. Azure has built a strong position in banking, financial services, and insurance, along with large enterprises that already run on Microsoft's ecosystem — Windows Server, Active Directory, and Office 365 — where sticking with one vendor simplifies integration. Google Cloud has carved out a smaller but real niche in data analytics and machine learning-heavy workloads. None of this means you need to master all three; it means the right one to prioritize depends on the industry and company type you're targeting, not on which platform is "best" in the abstract.

What this means if you're deciding where to invest

• If you're early-career, a foundational certification on one major provider — AWS Cloud Practitioner, Azure Fundamentals, or GCP's equivalent — is a relatively low-effort way to make your resume match a larger share of postings, even for roles that aren't explicitly "cloud" jobs.
• If you're mid-career in an on-premise-heavy role, treat this shift as a signal, not an emergency. The roles least affected so far are the ones tied to systems that are genuinely hard or risky to migrate — but that list keeps getting shorter.
• Don't chase certifications for their own sake. Pay premiums tied to cloud certifications vary widely by source and are easy to overstate; the more reliable signal is whether the certification maps to what postings in your target companies actually ask for.

The honest caveat

Exact salary premiums tied to specific certifications are reported inconsistently across different surveys and training providers, so it's worth treating any single number you see quoted elsewhere with some skepticism. The more durable takeaway is the trendline itself: cloud skills have gone from a specialization to something closer to table stakes across a growing share of Indian tech hiring, and that trajectory shows no sign of reversing.

Read more on cloud computing hiring trends in India.