Despite a dip in overall hiring, demand for cloud technology talent in India is at an all-time high, a trend accelerated due to the pandemic, reports the Economic Times. India’s ongoing Covid-19 cases is amplifying this demand, pushing salaries by as much as 100%, as more businesses seek to move to cloud platforms, survey data from staffing firm Xpheno showed. There is currently a talent shortage of 80% in the cloud space kicked off by the pandemic, Xpheno found. “Candidates with niche cloud skillsets are all set for a bountiful harvest in the year ahead,” Xpheno co-founder Kamal Karanth said. According to the survey, there were 70,000 job openings in this space in the January-March quarter of 2021, compared with 20,000 in the same quarter last year. Last month alone, there were 17,300 new openings.

Accenture has recently skilled more than 43,000 people in the cloud. Staffing firm Quess is working on 3,000 searches for cloud talent, almost a fourfold increase from last year. “The resurgence of the virus will accelerate the movement to cloud, as organisations will want to achieve scalability and security as they continue to operate remotely for the near future,” said Vijay Sivaram, CEO of Quess-IT Staffing, said. While the overall IT spend dropped by 10% in 2020, the budget on cloud went up by 35% according to Manu Saigal, director, general staffing, at Adecco Group India.