When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, employees around the world had to quickly switch to working from home, practically overnight. The cloud was an essential part of the successful switch made by many of these companies, who used it to ensure that employees could continue collaborating with each other as normal and continue doing their jobs from a home office without interruption. Today, cloud computing is seen as an essential feature of business growth and digital transformation and, according to the Flexera State of the Cloud Repot, more than half of businesses report that their cloud usage is higher than initially expected as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Need for Remote Work

As COVID-19 adversely affected people, businesses and the economy, the need for organizations to switch to a remote model of working has been essential for protecting employee health and keeping the business running in uncertain times, including cloud-based IT support. Digital transformation refers to the process of using technology to make business processes and services more efficient and agile. While it’s possible to digitally transform a business without cloud-based solutions, there are many reasons why most companies do choose them, not least because trying to transform digitally without the cloud is very limiting. 

What Benefits Does the Cloud Offer?

Although many smaller companies and startups today have begun with a digital-first model and have always operated on a cloud-first basis, more established and older businesses have faced a need to take on several projects or a larger journey to digitally transform their processes and entire operation. Some of the main benefits that companies get from using cloud computing include lower costs, greater software functionality that can increase the number of users, and simpler, faster technical deployment. Experts recommend that you take a considered, careful approach when migrating to the cloud. Even when the lockdowns began, companies were not rushing to the cloud but rather simply moving across projects that would be more effective and easier to accomplish when cloud-based. 

How COVID Impacted Cloud Use

During the lockdowns, many companies experienced a large increase in demand for their products and services. Streaming sites, for example, were hit with a massive demand increase as people spent double the number of minutes per day watching video on demand compared to a year before. On the other hand, the demand for other products and services, like luggage, dropped dramatically, sending established brands like Antler into administration shortly after the beginning of the pandemic. In addition to this need for companies to quickly scale up or down in response to the unprecedented demand, social distancing also meant that more employees than ever before were working remotely, and face-to-face meetings were no longer possible as a way of working. For companies, the most feasible solution to keep this working well was to make a switch to cloud-based solutions such as Zoom for communication. 

While more and more businesses were adopting the cloud to digitally transform their brands before the pandemic, and even more startups were using a cloud-first approach, COVID-19 has had a huge impact on how quickly many companies were to begin utilizing cloud solutions. 

Featured image from EastWestBank.com