Advanced PaaS is becoming the new competitive advantage in the cloud era

There was a time when moving to the cloud was the headline. Companies would announce migrations, talk about cost savings, and position it as a major transformation milestone. That moment has passed. Today, most enterprises are already on the cloud in some form, so the conversation has quietly shifted. What matters now is what companies are actually doing with it. And that’s where the gap is starting to show.

In many organisations, cloud still looks like hosted infrastructure, reliable, scalable, but not fundamentally changing how products are built or delivered. In others, it is enabling faster releases, tighter feedback loops, and more experimentation. The difference often comes down to how deeply platforms like PaaS are being used.

PaaS itself isn’t new. For years, it stayed in the background as a developer tool, useful for deployment, but not something that shaped business outcomes. That’s changing. As digital products take centre stage, the ability to build and iterate quickly is no longer just a technical concern. It’s a business one.

The broader market context makes this shift harder to ignore. The global cloud market is expected to cross USD 900 billion in 2026, driven largely by AI workloads and data-heavy applications. At the same time, [India’s cloud market is growing at nearly 20% annually, with projections suggesting it could touch USD 80–85 billion over the next few years. 

What’s interesting is not just the scale, but the depth of usage. Nearly 90–94% of enterprises globally now use cloud services, and a growing share of them are moving beyond basic infrastructure to platform-led architectures. 

Modern PaaS platforms reflect that shift. They bring together capabilities that were earlier fragmented-AI and machine learning tools, databases, DevOps workflows, APIs, and security layers. On paper, that sounds incremental. In practice, it removes a lot of friction. Teams don’t have to assemble everything themselves or manage as many dependencies.

The result is fairly straightforward: things move faster. Releases happen more often. Feedback comes earlier. Adjustments take less time. Over a period, that steady pace creates a visible gap between companies that can keep up and those that can’t.

In India, this shift is unfolding alongside strong policy and infrastructure momentum. Cloud is expected to contribute up to 8% of the country’s GDP by 2026, while large-scale investments, such as multi-billion-dollar data centre expansions in regions like Maharashtra, are accelerating capacity and access. 

There’s also a quieter change happening inside organisations. When less time is spent managing infrastructure, teams tend to focus more on building and improving products. It doesn’t always happen automatically, but where it does, the impact compounds over time.

None of this makes PaaS a guaranteed advantage. Used poorly, it’s just another layer in the stack. But used well, it changes the pace at which a business operates-and that, more than anything else, is starting to define competitiveness in the cloud era.

By - Sajiv Nair, Chief Technology Officer & Chief Information Officer, ESDS

Sajiv Nair