Cloud: The backbone of today’s work and its benefits amidst the pandemic
Covid-19 has been the biggest disrupter that we have seen in decades affecting people equally across the globe with businesses struggling to maintain operations and keeping people employed. Yet many are transitioning to remote work with relative ease. With companies announcing long-term plans to continue working from home, some have found remote work so successful they are considering making it permanent. Now, what is the difference between adapting to new circumstances and struggling to stay afloat?
The answer is obvious. The Cloud!
Cloud computing is said to be behind the success stories of individuals and businesses alike. In times of uncertainty, where flexibility plays an important role, companies who have implemented the cloud will benefit greatly. With us being online and all that we need is at our fingertips, our day-to-day activities have become much easier. We use a single device and take it anywhere, something that is normally not a part of the Holy Grail but has now become an inevitable part. The cloud is enabling a whole lot of new services and adding an ever-growing number of patrons who can connect easily as well as be productive regardless of our location.
One of the greatest promises of the IT sector today is the idea of working remotely and across the world across different domains and spaces. Most of the assignments and projects are spaced over various places and teams are coordinating with the help of common group platforms and sharing ideas across the web. This is only possible because of the cloud. The advent of the Internet of Things has also led to a metamorphosis of things all over and everyone is getting benefitted out of this.
Coming to what are the differences between adapting to new circumstances and staying afloat? The answers are in the numbers. In just two months, Zoom added the most number of video conferencing users than it was in 2019. In April the same year, Microsoft teams had a daily active user base that jumped to 70% reaching a whopping 75 million. Nvidia’s sales topped $ 1 billion the same year and all this happened to owe to rampant use of the cloud to face the normal. Organizations big and small are meeting today’s challenges by rampant use of cloud that helped reach targeted audiences remotely and virtually too.
So there are people who are still sceptical about the same about the full harmony between work as well as life will equate to positive changes for an average employee. An average Joe cannot oppose an increasing ability where he can separate his private life from his job. Most of the firms have adopted recent trends in technology which is on their side and it is debatable whether enterprise-scale remote work is more feasible.
Top firms such as IBM etc. which are the pioneers for remote work have put an end to the decades-old policy of allowing employees to contribute without setting foot in any corporate office. Let us say that the only recipe for success is to include the best people, have a good mission, the right tools, analysis of results, and creative and inspiring locations.
The cloud is here to stay and become the new “Normal”
We owe a lot to the cloud. People can easily collaborate with co-workers, communicate with clients, shop online whilst working, and develop products as if we are working from home and meeting in the office. With the cloud, business booming and becoming one of the critical capabilities ever and companies are highly relying on it. The biggest cloud providers in the world such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have seen unprecedented growth and value. Google is said to have reported cloud revenue of up to 52 percent year over year. Microsoft has reported a 27 percent increase and Amazon reported cloud revenue up to 33 percent.
The cloud business is booming. Huge….
Cloud has become one of today’s most critical capabilities, and companies of all kinds are relying on it more heavily than ever. Most top cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have reported a significant growth in cloud revenue. Google reported that in Q1 the cloud revenue was up 52 percent, Amazon was up to 33 percent and Microsoft’s cloud group was said to have over a 27 percent increase.
Even after the pandemic is over, there will be uncertainty with possible resurges of the virus, unpredictable markets and most companies need to look for more options to innovate and adapt faster thus including flexibility and resilience into their strategies with the help of the cloud. As businesses update their strategies, the first step that they may have to identify is where in their organization cloud services and infrastructure can be integrated to drive in more value in the post-COVID world.
Now imagine the following scenario: Most factories and manufacturing plants are being closed due to sinking or changing demands and to protect their employees from spreading the virus. Cloud technology helps identify new demand and maintain safe operations with no or fewer shutdowns in the future. Last year, Salesforce announced “Salesforce care for manufacturing”, which helped manufacturers to update operations and to reallocate resources to produce the most critical supplies that can be given for COVID-19 relief. It offered better visibility and could forecast demand for the future too. Cloud AI of Google was quite advanced and included a development environment, building blocks that could make it easier to create AI applications, plug-and-play components, etc. and this is said to be the future in the coming years.
Cloud technology also helps workers to maintain safe distances and can collect information from many on-site systems, give workers a real-time view of operations. It can spot defects easily and maintain quality even without people being present physically. Cloud is said to be the ticket to greater flexibility, experimentation, and faster reactions to the changing market needs. Thus the value of the cloud is indisputable. It lowers costs, eliminated on-premise servers, and scales data storage, and computes power on demand. It is said to the simplest path to experiment with, test, and adopt new technologies.
On the concluding note, overcoming challenges is what we and most businesses must face in case of another wave of a pandemic or something entirely different. Now that we see the value that the cloud offers, it’s time to jump on the Cloud bandwagon if not today, but tomorrow.
