Ensuring Business Continuity with Cloud & Enabling Safe, Secure and Collaborative Remote Working Spaces
Over a month and a half into the lockdown, the Covid-19 crisis continues confronting us in ways we never imagined. Despite its growing impact on businesses and economies—in addition to the unpredictability, many companies have started working on their business restart strategies.
Since 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.
Naturally, organizations across sectors have turned to cloud with unprecedented agility to facilitate some of these biggest transformations 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 light of the coronavirus crisis.
Here’s how Cloud is helping organizations ensure business continuity during – and after – the crisis.
1. Cloud makes remote working possible
2. Cloud provides the right tools for remote learning and collaboration
3. Cloud is providing effective disaster recovery methods
4. Cloud is enabling advanced analytics & AI during the pandemic
1. Cloud makes remote working possible:
One of the biggest changes the pandemic triggered is how the corporate world works. Remote working became the new norm even before we realized it. Across sectors, companies had to adapt to this new normal without having time to prepare for the bulk of their workforce working from home. Without Cloud, this transition would have been a nightmare for many organizations. Many quickly turned to cloud as the most viable option for employees to work securely from any location.
Desktop-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 devices. This also meant that the employer did not have to worry about 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. Cloud is becoming an inevitable component for creating proper digital workspaces.
2. Cloud provides the right tools for remote learning and collaboration
During the lockdown, educators in the country shifted to virtual classrooms to ensure 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 in 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 opens up new possibilities for healthcare workers during the pandemic.
The need to do proper due diligence while choosing cloud-based tools was stressed like never before. In the future, with Covid-19 likely to disrupt many business processes in the long run, cloud-based on-demand tools are expected to stay in the mainstream.
3. Cloud is providing effective disaster recovery methods
A good business continuity plan must be efficient enough to react to completely unexpected adversaries –including the long-term impacts of pandemics. Traditional disaster recovery plans revolved around natural calamities, network outages, or cyber incidents, which have a much shorter window. The new crisis has shattered these notions and urged organizations to look for sustainable DR plans 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.
4. Cloud is enabling advanced analytics & AI during pandemic
From drug discovery to contact tracing to predicting clusters, medical researchers and governments in various countries have extensively used data analytics and big data. In this fight against the pandemic, the cloud has become the most effective platform 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 health data analytics.
From an enterprise point of view, organizations 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 the changed economy of the future.
