Will the Coronavirus crisis accelerate our journey to the Cloud?

Cloud Computing during COVID-19

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In the last few weeks, more and more organizations and firms are having difficulties in operating their businesses. Organizations found out their Business Continuity Plan (BCP) isn’t enough to handle a severe disruption that impacts any aspect of the organization's life.

The issues we’re facing with refers to the following:

1. Many websites are experiencing poor performance since many customers use online services instead of using physical services (supermarkets, apparel shops, etc.).
2. Employees were ordered to stay at home and work remotely by using the organization infrastructure; in many cases, the traffic increased by several hundred percent in days. The massive growth of remote users requires enough licensing and compute resources.
3. High users capacity increasing WAN utilization.
4. Employees are accessing it from home. Some of them are quarantined or staying in many different locations.
5. Private computers are not the most secure endpoints. How do we protect these endpoints?
6. To maintain regular working routines, the employees need simple, mobile, and robust tools.
7. How we scale-up/out our systems when the global supply chain is experiencing a lack of materials and human resources to produce these hardware devices.
8. The upcoming global recession will push companies to cut expenses. How would they implement it? How do they manage their IT more efficiently?

How can cloud adoption help organizations to deal with a new situation?

1. Use easy scale-up/out services.
2. Pay as you go. Add new licenses/services as much as required to overcome peaks. Immediately removes what isn’t necessary.
3. By using new cloud services, businesses will face the challenge more efficiently by using collaboration and productivity services.
4. Give your IT and your users the ability to run desktops with a high-security level. Give your IT the more efficient tools to orchestrate the desktop's environment.

What to do now?

1. Plan your cloud strategy;
2. Review the use-cases to start with;
3. Design your cloud security architecture
4. FinOps. Finance your way to the cloud;

This crisis, in a way, is a wake-up call for all of us to prepare our IT for the new challenges that happen to come.