The domestic cloud computing market is expected to touch USD 1.08 billion by 2015 from USD 110 million currently, research firm Zinnov today here said.

Cloud computing refers to a pay-per-use model of computing where applications and software are accessed over the Internet and not owned by users. IT companies can save huge costs on these products as they would not have to invest in purchasing them, resulting in reduced IT costs.

"We are expecting sectors like banking and financial services, telecom, manufacturing and government to drive cloud adoption in the country. As companies look at cost and operational efficiency, they would embrace the cloud," Zinnov Management Consulting chief executive Pari Natarajan told reporters here.

These sectors have huge data storage requirements and complex applications, which can be served well through the cloud, he added.

The global cloud computing market is expected to grow to USD 70 billion by 2015 from USD 20 billion now.

The adoption of cloud computing is being led by the small and medium businesses. "Domestic SMBs in specific, lack budgets and often the staff required to manage internal IT.

However, they are looking for rapid growth and to achieve that, cloud computing is indeed the answer," Zinnov manager Praveen Bhadada said.

Cloud computing has three parts: software-as-a-service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Platform as a service (PaaS). While SaaS, which is the most common form, is likely to touch USD 650 million-mark by 2015, PaaS and IaaS markets cumulatively would touch USD 434 million each by then, the study said.

The SaaS market, estimated to be about USD 66 million currently, is dominated by applications like customer relationship management, enterprise resource management and e-mail solutions. "These numbers do not include private clouds (servers), otherwise it is a much more wider market," Bhadada pointed out.

Some organisations, especially larger ones, set up a cloud-like infrastructure in their own data centre to secure data, which is called a private cloud. Public cloud refers to providers such as Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com, whose shared services are available to all.