India’s cloud adoption story has accelerated dramatically over the past decade. According to NASSCOM, the Indian public cloud services market is projected to cross USD 17.8 billion by 2027, with SMEs accounting for nearly 45% of the adoption. Yet, challenges remain – fragmented cloud migration strategies, regulatory compliance gaps and a shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals often expose SMEs to risks they can ill afford.
Against this backdrop, CloudNow Technologies, founded in 2014, has emerged as a distinctive India-born player that blends service delivery with product innovation. At its core is Akku, an identity and access management (IAM) solution built with a security-first philosophy for businesses that need enterprise-grade features without the complexity or prohibitive cost.
We spoke with the leadership team at CloudNow – Mr. Madhav Sattanathan (CEO & Founder), Mr. Aravindh Ramachandran (COO), Mr. Satya Dev Addepally (CTO) and Mr. Dinesh Harikrishnan (VP – Sales), to understand their journey, their perspectives on SME cloud challenges and their vision for the future.
From Reseller to Innovator: The Founder’s Vision
Q: When you founded CloudNow in 2014, what was the biggest challenge?
Mr. Madhav Sattanathan (CEO & Founder): We began as resellers of Google Mail for Work, but the vision was always to move into software development for global clients. The hardest shift was adapting our mindset – from selling a mature product to building applications from scratch. In 2017, our first Time and Material deal in the US validated that pivot. Since then, our strategy has centred on leveraging our cybersecurity expertise to become an India-born OEM, because most cybersecurity product companies still come from the US or Israel.
Q: How do you balance product development and services growth?
They are distinct tracks. Services are a crowded and brand-driven space with low visibility for smaller players. For us, Akku was not a side project but a deliberate bet on differentiation, using our cybersecurity DNA to stand apart in a saturated services market.
Driving Service Quality in a Fast-Changing Market
Q: How do you maintain customer satisfaction while scaling?
Mr. Aravindh Ramachandran (COO): It’s about focus. Processes matter, but so does common sense. We measure progress constantly, keep sight of long-term goals and course correct as needed. The foundation remains first principles – understand needs, set honest expectations, deliver quality relentlessly and be transparent when things don’t go as planned. In fact, client trust often deepens during adversity if you handle it with honesty.
Q: How have your cross-industry experiences shaped service delivery?
Different sectors – healthcare, financial services, e-learning – may have unique nuances, but the common thread is clear: strong relationships, quality delivery and honesty. What differs is less important than what unites them: trust and execution.
The CTO’s Lens: Cloud Modernization Bottlenecks
Q: What are the top bottlenecks SMEs face in cloud adoption?
Mr. Satya Dev Addepally (CTO): We consistently see four recurring patterns: (a) fragmented adoption without a security-first architecture, (b) legacy dependencies not built for cloud elasticity, (c) lack of observability across cloud-native components and (d) inconsistent compliance enforcement. SMEs often treat security as an afterthought. Our approach is Secure by Design – embedding governance and contextual security at the architecture level.
Q: How do you keep teams updated amidst rapid tech change?
We run internal “innovation pods” where engineers experiment with real-world labs. Each pod has security champions embedded, ensuring DevSecOps is ingrained. Our quarterly security posture reviews integrate regulatory updates like India’s DPDP Act with threat intelligence. Akku plays a bridging role, providing contextual, identity-aware security across hybrid environments. The real challenge isn’t tech – it’s cultural inertia. Agility without governance always breeds risk.
Taking Akku to Market: Sales Meets Product
Q: What challenges did you face in launching Akku?
Mr. Dinesh Harikrishnan (VP – Sales): The biggest challenge was balancing enterprise-grade IAM features with SMB simplicity. We focused only on critical features while feeding customer feedback directly from sales into product development. Another hurdle was building credibility as an Indian-made IAM solution, which we overcame through strong demos, case studies and proofs-of-concept.
Q: How do you ensure sales promises don’t outpace technical feasibility?
By bringing solutioning and product teams into pre-sales early. For clients with limited cloud maturity, we start with core IAM features like SSO or MFA before scaling up. This phased approach delivers quick wins, builds confidence and avoids overpromising.
Industry Foresight: What Lies Ahead
CloudNow’s journey highlights an important lesson for SMEs: cloud adoption cannot be an afterthought, and security cannot be an overlay. The future belongs to SMEs that embrace “Secure by Design” models, codify compliance into their pipelines and foster cultures of continuous learning.
With India poised to become the world’s third-largest public cloud market by 2030, the competitive edge will rest on trust – trust in resilient systems, trustworthy data governance and trusted local innovators who can balance affordability with enterprise-grade security. CloudNow’s story offers a roadmap: build credibility, embed security and turn cultural inertia into agility.
