Covid-19 a Catalyst for Adoption of Cloud Computing

As the COVID-19 pandemic forced countries into strict lockdowns, organizations moved to the work from home option for their employees. Thus, came the requirement to access critical applications from remote locations, for which cloud computing is the only solution. Though most organizations/companies have been working at a steady pace towards the adoption of cloud computing technologies, this Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the efforts for the same.

Worldwide, most organizations have responded to the Covid-19 pandemic by ensuring that their employees are safe and are placed to work comfortably. The next step has been to ensure business continuity which can be achieved by enabling employees to work remotely from the safety of their homes. However, a number of organizations do not have the capacity to extend remote working options to all their employees. Organizations have been forced adopt cloud computing at a speed never seen before.

Today, cloud computing is vital for both workforce enablement, business continuity and in general to eliminate the risk to operations. “Though not new, acceleration towards the adoption of cloud computing technologies to solve these problems is expected as the situation starts to become normal,” states Ashutosh Sharma, VP and research director, Forrester. Also, organizations with data centres available on premise are facing difficulties to maintain the up time. This is going to force organizations to consider cloud adoption and more cloud-based ERPs.

Areas Impacted by Cloud

The requirement for networking and computing will most likely grow in sectors, such as entertainment, online media, and gaming due to the Covid-19 lockdowns imposed. Thus, cloud service providers have optimized these demands, for example Amazon Prime streaming their videos only in SD. Telehealth and remote monitoring are gaining importance. More intelligence is being set up in areas such as crowd management, video surveillance, and to provide support to quarantine and alleviation efforts. Cloud and edge computing can provide huge benefits to such efforts which in turn will decrease dormancy and enable quick responses to critical services,” notes Subramanian Gopalaratnam, CTO, Resulticks.

Tech Companies Benefit

Google has announced that its advanced features in Google Meet are free of cost to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers worldwide. Meet Hardware is also available in markets, such Hong Kong, South Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan, and South Africa, to ensure that customers have the appropriate hardware that complements their Meet solution. 3i Infotech has partnered with Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Alibaba Cloud, to launch Remote Worker as a Service. This VPN-as-a-Service enables remote working by hosting any on-premise application or server. It also enables businesses to move to cloud easily, adapt to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and mobility in a hybrid IT environment.

Tech Mahindra has partnered with IBM to help clients deploy core business applications to IBM public cloud by using IBM Cloud Paks. As a part of this deal, Tech Mahindra and IBM will set up innovation centres designed to solve business problems across industries, such as manufacturing, financial services, retail, insurance, and healthcare.

Conclusion

While the policies in place do not enable cloud to not be synonymous with core banking solutions, this will change in the near future, if cloud services are based within the country. This in turn means more flexibility for increasing the resource based on the needs. With adoption of cloud computing technologies, lighter code needs to be developed for better user experience. Thus, this is the next big opportunity for partners and the developer community.