Four ways cloud is helping you build resilience during crisis - Amit Gupta, CEO & Founder, Rapyder Cloud Solutions
More than a month and half into the lockdown, the Covid-19 crisis continues to confront us in ways that we have never imagined. Despite its growing impact on businesses and economies—in addition to the unpredictability, many companies have actually started working on their restart strategies.
Since the time the pandemic hit us, we have discovered many new lessons on survival—working and learning remotely, mobilizing resources more quickly and innovating at breakneck speeds.Quite naturally, organizations across sectors have turned to cloud with unprecedented agility in order to facilitate some of these biggest transformations that they are undergoing.A recent cloud survey conducted by Flexera highlights that as much as 50 percent of organizations (both SMBs and enterprises combined) plan to increase their cloud usage in the light of coronavirus crisis. Here’s how Cloud is helping organizations ensure business continuity during –and after—the crisis.
Cloud makes remote working possible:
One of the biggest changes that the pandemic triggered is in the way the corporate world works. Remote working became the new norm even before we realized. Across sectors, companies had to adapt to this new normal without really having the time to prepare for bulk of their workforce working from home. Without Cloud, this transition would have been a nightmare for many organizations. Many of them quickly turned to cloud as the most viable option for employees to work securely from any location.
Desktop-as-as-a-service (DaaS) model has proven to be a great boon for organizations during this time. This allows employees (who don’t necessarily have a corporate laptop) to access a cloud desktop from anywhere with an internet connection, through their own personal devices. This also meant that the employer does not have to worry about factors such as security, productivity, reliability of VPN connections or scalability. Amazon WorkSpaces—a fully managed DaaS offering, for instance, witnessed exceptional adoption during the last few weeks. For the creation of true digital workspaces, Cloud is turning out to be an inevitable component.
Cloud provides the right tools for remote learning and collaboration
During the lockdown, educators in the country shifted to virtual classrooms to ensure that the learning continued. Such a quick transition wouldn’t have been possible without cloud-based video and collaboration tools available today. Many distant learning tools came handy for schools and children while adapting to these changes. Leading cloud providers like AWS stepped in with additional support, resources and self-service functionalities to help shift to remote learning. In the enterprise world, cloud-based video collaboration ensured minimal disruption while maintaining a sense of ‘business as usual’ among employees.
Cloud-based communication and collaboration platforms are also facilitating smooth coordination among health workers. The combination of telemedicine and cloud is opening up new possibilities for healthcare workers during the pandemic.
The need to do proper due diligence while choosing cloud-based tools was stressed upon like never before. In future, with Covid-19 likely to disrupt many business processes in the long run, cloud-based on-demand tools are expected to stay in mainstream.
Cloud is providing effective disaster recovery methods
A good business continuity plan must be efficient enough to react to the completely unexpected adversaries –including the long-term impacts that pandemics bring in. Traditional disaster recovery plans revolved around natural calamities, network outages or cyber incidents which has a much shorter window. The new crisis has shattered these notions and has urged organization to look for DR plans that are sustainable over longer periods of time—with resources and data accessible all the time.
DR systems that run on flexible and proactive cloud-based platforms are already the preferred option for many organizations for workload continuity.
Cloud is enabling advanced analytics & AI during pandemic
From drug discovery to contact tracing to predicting clusters, data analytics and big data have been extensively used by medical researchers and governments in various countries. In this fight against the pandemic, cloud has become the most effective platform of choice for extracting relevant information and insights from the massive amounts of data available. Infinite storage, real-time analytics, flexibility and security are among the reasons for cloud becoming the preferred platform for advanced analytics of health data.
From an enterprise-point of view, organizations that have been wary of moving data science projects to cloud will now see better value for cloud. Cloud-based analytics will address the major critical factors for organizations in the post-covid world—cost savings, performance and agility.
With many countries heading for recession, cloud is predicted to provide the much-needed resilience and agility to reorganize for the new world realities. We hope that organizations will focus on their cloud priorities to be winners in a changed economy of the future.