COVID 19’s impact has been inescapable for all of us. For businesses like us, we witnessed a massive move to remote working. The transition to this new reality of work has not been the same for all. If remote working was a revolution, as Count Otto Von Bismarck famously said, some companies undertook the revolution and some had to undergo the revolution rather painfully. Either ways, businesses moved to leverage the power of the cloud and with the amount of capital that is being invested in this space it is quite likely that businesses will continue to be on the cloud even after the pandemic relents and finally subsides.
Based on a recent survey carried out by Standard and Poor, almost 40% of the participating companies cited a move to third party public cloud service providers like AWS, MS Azure etc. More than 80% of whom think that the move is now permanent.
We would be careful to state COVID 19 as cause for this massive move since the global IT sentiment has been moving towards the Cloud anyway. However it can be said that COVID 19 did act as a catalyst that accelerated the adoption of cloud across sectors, even the sectors that are generally slow to embrace new technologies had to quicken their pace.
Enterprise software ISVs, be it be, IaaS, PaaS or SaaS reported increased adoption across the board onto their product platforms. Remote presence / meeting services like Zoom, Google Meetings and Microsoft Teams also saw an explosion in the number of their adopters. Sales and Marketing software which saw quite a sizable dip from the second quarter of 2020 also picked up in the later in 2020 with solutions like Salesforce and Hubspot leading the pack
More than 30% of the respondents of the survey carried out by Standards and Poor’s survey project even more spending in these sectors in 2021 with sales and marketing software such as Salesforce expected to lead in 2021 as well. Another sector that saw tremendous growth during this ongoing pandemic is the eCommerce sector. With businesses increasingly adopting E-commerce solutions, both third party such as Shopify and personal portal, this directly affects the penetration of cloud service providers such as AWS in this realm.
Along with public cloud, private cloud too has seen increased adoption, though the number is at less than 15 percent, it is still an increase from previous time periods. Private clouds have historically been a small segment owing to the specific overheads that come along with managing cloud infrastructure in house of which online hardening of cloud infrastructure turns out to be a sizable chunk of the overheads. This overhead is mostly because of the human and infrastructure capital that must be maintained in house to maintain maximum uptime and availability with proper security in place.
As businesses continue to claw their way out of the COVID situation, they are under pressure to become leaner, smarter and more nimble to respond to the changing scenarios now and in the post pandemic world. No wonder Cloud is increasingly looking as the perfect way for such businesses to shed excess weight and gain mobility.
If you have been on the fence about moving to the cloud, here is the link to an article that covers the pros and cons of both cloud and on premise deployment of enterprise solutions.