The word “Digital Transformation” is not at all new. Based upon your understanding and knowledge, it can date back to the advent of the twentieth century. With the arrival of Big3 (Google, Microsoft and Amazon) in cloud services, cloud adoption has become mainstream. Major leading organizations have been on the path of digitalization for almost decades. But over the last 2 years with the onset of the pandemic, major industries like travel and tourism suffered a hard hit along with the other small and large organizations following similar business models, hence digitization has become crucial to their survival and future plans. Looking ahead into the future, it is a no brainer that these digital technologies are going to play a pivotal role in any organization’s success.
However, looking into these last two years of the pandemic, cloud adoption among other digital technologies has proved to be the ultimate boon and it is here to stay and not fall by the wayside.
The lockdown and the remote working needs created by the Covid-19 pandemic were a reality check to all sorts of organizations whether large or small. The restrictions that were imposed due to the pandemic not only turned down the world order but also changed the way businesses operate. The pandemic put a major halt on each and everything but it proved to be a blessing for cloud services. While other companies were scaling down and reviewing their strategies, the demand for the cloud services spiked all over the world. During the first quarter of 2020 when the whole world was inside homes, “the spending on cloud increased to 37% that amounts to mammoth $2 billions.” In April 2020 just after going two months into the pandemic, “Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella reported that his organization saw two years of Digital Transformation in just those two months as more and more companies adopted cloud.” At the time, when more and more people were accessing services through online medium, it was critically essential for the businesses to have high availability, business resilience and flexible computing power offered by the cloud. Here are some reasons why cloud adoption skyrocketed during the pandemic:
- Provides Business Resilience: Major talks about cloud in the past were regarding the infrastructure management, quicker innovation and faster cost optimization. But pandemic has brought different outlook of flexible computing power, disaster recovery, high availability, lower backup cost that has made businesses more resilient.
- Business Evolution: Businesses have also evolved in this socially awkward era with the need to preserve customer base in these hard times. There has been exponential increase in e-commerce industry as well as video streaming services. This has led to traditional business being shifted to online while curbing pickup and increasing home deliveries to maintain customers.
- Remote Working: The pandemic and more people working remote has highlighted the importance of cloud for business continuation as well as maintained collaboration.
- Education: In the pandemic almost all the universities and colleges have shifted to online platform with the adoption of cloud. They accepted the cloud whole heartedly even for examinations and evaluations.
- Business Sustainability: Now in the last few years, many governments in the world started focusing on the environmental impacts of business. Many organizations have started adopting cloud in a way to reach their carbon reduction goals.
But is cloud adoption a fad that will fade away as the masks come off or is it going to remain as important as it is in the pandemic? The answer to this question is a big NO as indicated by the statistics from Gartner back in 2020 itself, that the worldwide spending on cloud will grow by 18.4% in 2021 which is $304.9 billion. The actual spending in 2021 was $410.9 billion which surpassed the predictions by a huge difference.
A major reason why the organizations will be maintaining the status quo of the cloud services because covid has not only changed the businesses but also redefined the way we used to operate in our daily lives to a “new normal”. Most of the conditions that made the changes to the business during the era of pandemic still exist in one way or the other. Let’s take the example of remote working, although it began as a contingency measure till the lockdowns would be lifted, it became the new normal. According to Flexjobs survey, 58% of the people will switch to new jobs if their employers will not allow remote working. 65% want to work remotely post-pandemic as compared to a mere 2% that want to return to office. Cloud has helped companies to fight the adverse impacts of pandemic and by keeping the cloud-based operations post pandemic, they will be able to do much more than just maintaining the status quo. They can:
- Scale easily: By using cloud services, enterprises can scale up and down anytime in case of any infrastructure requirement.
- More diverse business opportunity: From e-learning at institutes to online healthcare & medicine facilities to virtual experiences, business with cloud-based technologies can easily adapt to different shifting trends in the industry.
- Increased Security: Now in today’s time with the ever increased online activities and cybercrimes, the need to protect client data has become highly important. Cloud based businesses come with built in security and compliance features.
- Shockproof your organization: After coming long way through pandemic, by keeping operations in the cloud can help them mitigate the risk that come with the unforeseen circumstances.
But as a quote in Batman says, “With great power comes great responsibility”, with the ever-increasing cloud usage there are challenges that are faced by the cloud service industry:
- Skilled Talents: With the increasing cloud adoption, the need for service and maintenance has increased a lot. There is dire need for specialized and upskilled talents that can serve this ever-growing industry.
- Security Issues: The growth in online activity has also posed security threats to the cloud-based services and companies have to deal with it with the utmost care.
- Research and Development: The pandemic has established cloud as a strategic tool for growth and development but there is constant need for upscale in the cloud services with ever increasing demand and competition.
With the passing of the pandemic and new normal as well as introduction to Metaverse, the cloud services will increase exponentially and even accelerate in near future.