For years, the cloud has been expanding its reach, offering companies a way to access computing resources cheaply, without having to pay in-house IT staff. But now that COVID-19 is here, and we’re in our hour of need, it is proving its value more than ever.
For some companies, the cloud is the reason they are still in business. Non-essential offices have sent their staff home. But for the first time, they’re able to access all company resources through domestic WiFi.
And that fact is what is currently greasing the wheels of what remains of the economy. The cloud is a kind of saviour technology that nobody expected.
Just imagine for a moment if this same crisis had happened in 2010. The chaos would have been immense. Companies would have had to figure out some way to transition their operations onto the internet through clunky portals.
The demand for IT services would have been so high that most companies wouldn’t have been able to make the move, even if they had wanted to. Entire knowledge industries would have ground to a halt.
Scalability Proves Its Worth
Perhaps the most celebrated feature of the cloud is its scalability. Companies can begin using services at the level of a few gigabytes. Then, if demand builds, they can just buy more and get it in an instant.
With millions of people now working from home, we’ve seen something rather interesting. The internet itself is creaking, but cloud infrastructure remains abundant. Connection speed is the problem for many companies – not storage capability.
Surprisingly, we’ve seen relatively few issues with the cloud, despite the wholesale shift in that direction. A few firms have seen service degradation over the last couple of weeks, but again, that has more to do with ISPs than it does with cloud service providers.
The way the cloud has bobbed and weaved in this crisis has been nothing short of remarkable. While most of the systems our civilization relies on are feeling the strain, distributed computing has been nothing short of an unmitigated triumph.
It is hard to imagine how the transition of millions of workers from their regular platforms to working from home could have gone better. Everyone is on Zoom, and there are no complaints. It’s a miracle.
People Will Just Have To Get Used To Working From Home In Their Pyjamas
Red Cortex is an IT service company that helps firms to move over to cloud computing. Like other companies in the industry, it has never seen such a profound and dramatic shift in the direction of the technology.
Necessity struck, and companies flipped the way in which they operate their network. And it all happened fast, proving the latent value of the technology. When push came to shove, most businesses decided to take the plunge and switch. They had no other choice.
Remote work is likely to be with us for a while. The traditional office will collapse, and may not recover for some time. The cloud, therefore, will become the new infrastructure. People will have to get used to working in their pyjamas.
