New Delhi, Jan 30 (IANS): Nearly 43 per cent of Indian businesses say their Cloud strategies are fully implemented and working, a new survey said on Tuesday, adding that an emerging group of businesses that have 70 per cent or more of their applications in the Cloud are outperforming their competitors globally.

In terms of Cloud strategy implementation in India, 40 per cent of the businesses said that their strategy implementation was progressing.

Nearly a fifth (18 per cent), however, said their strategy development for Cloud was in its infancy, said the survey conducted by market research firm Longitude Research, along with Cloud major Oracle and chip-maker Intel.

The research found that businesses in India were looking to capitalise on new and innovative technologies, such as open source, multi-platform capabilities and visual tools in the next year.

"Additionally, nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of IT executives from India felt that automation capabilities were important to the business and a fifth put an importance on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) within the organisation," the survey said.

Eighty one per cent of Indian respondents agreed that Cloud adoption offers the ability to better meet customer demands and 45 per cent felt there are major security issues in moving IT operations and data to the Cloud.

The survey called businesses who have reached "Cloud Maturity" by achieving critical mass in Cloud that increased their productivity and competitiveness as "Cloud Masters".

"Comprising 12 per cent of respondents, the research shows that these 'Cloud Masters' are more data-driven being better able to access, experiment and get insight from their business information, innovative and better able to respond to customer needs with greater relevance, speed and agility," the survey noted.

The survey asked 730 C-suite (CEOs, CTOs) and senior IT executives from 13 countries, including India, Canada, Britain and the US.

"In 2018, the gap between 'Cloud Masters' and those lagging behind has the potential to widen significantly," said Andrew Sutherland, Senior Vice President of Systems and Technology for Oracle Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia Pacific (APAC).

"This comes from having the experience to apply the emerging technologies to business and from having invested in the right cloud platform, infrastructure and tools meaning these companies can accelerate their way to competitive success," Sutherland added.