As economic pressures mount and investor scrutiny on unit economics intensifies, Indian startups are cutting their spends on one of the most significant parts of their technology infrastructure — cloud storage and compute — by renegotiating contracts with service providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Multiple startup founders have confirmed this trend is accelerating rapidly across the ecosystem.
Many of these companies have slashed cloud expenses by 20 to 30 percent while some growth stage startups have brought down their cloud expenses by as much as 50 percent, under pressure to control their cash burn during a period of tightened venture funding and higher interest rates.
This has led to the top three cloud service providers — Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure — effectively waging pricing wars to retain startups on their platforms during the current market downturn, offering credits, discounts, and extended payment terms that were not available just two years ago.
Cybersecurity ecosystem
The cloud renegotiation trend has an important secondary effect that is being underappreciated — it is exposing significant security gaps in how Indian startups have been managing their cloud environments. When companies move quickly to reduce cloud spend, they sometimes disable monitoring tools, reduce logging retention, or consolidate environments in ways that inadvertently reduce their security posture.
The Data Security Council of India has forecast that the cybersecurity ecosystem will expand up to a point where nearly one million professionals will be required by 2025. Additionally, the demand for cloud security skills is estimated to grow by 115 percent between 2020 and 2025, representing almost 20,000 job openings.
An extensive exercise in reskilling and upskilling the existing workforce is one of the ways that organisations can future proof their cloud security capabilities as this demand grows and the threat landscape becomes more sophisticated.
Indian businesses are expected to significantly increase their investments on cloud security, with the 5G rollout expected to spark a surge in network vulnerabilities that will assume critical importance especially for enterprises operating hybrid cloud environments.
