Adoption of cloud services has been massive ever since companies began to realize the importance of digitally transformed businesses. Cloud adoption has been popular across all industries for a very long time. Majority of large enterprises had already shifted towards cloud infrastructures while the small and medium enterprises were beginning to adopt the services. However, as the unfortunate Covid-19 pandemic struck the world in 2020, all companies had to figure out a way to work digitally so that they stay in business. Among many other technologies that were taken up by organizations during this time, cloud computing got adopted most speedily. Spending on cloud services rose by 37% in the first quarter of 2020 itself. In fact, as of February 2021, 43% of businesses had accelerated their company’s cloud transformation due to the pandemic.

Hence, it is clear that the Covid-19 pandemic has been steering businesses to adopt cloud computing at an increasing rate. But how? In this blog, we have listed and explained few ways in which cloud adoption has sped up because of the pandemic:

1. Remote Working

Working in the pandemic increased the popularity of the remote working culture, more commonly known as the work from home culture. In order to collaborate online seamlessly for the sake of smooth workflows, companies across all industries have been leveraging cloud computing in some form or the other. 

Numerous benefits of cloud computing in a work from home setting, such as the ability to share documents with third parties easily, all team members collaborating on a project conveniently with automated update options, data synchronization and the flexibility to work on the files from any device or location are attracting more and more users to it. 

2. Resilient Business Operations

Business resiliency is a concerning issue for organizations across all industries, especially since the pandemic clarified that anything can go wrong at any time. Now traditionally, cloud computing attracted users because of its modern infrastructure and lower costs. However, working in the pandemic made it clearer that cloud computing can play a huge role in business resiliency, thus attracting more users. 

Some ways it contributes to business resiliency are: 

  • flexible computing power
  • disaster recovery
  • high availability
  • resilient core for business processes and continuity
  • remote workforce management
  • business agility 

3. Increased Healthcare Investments

Caregiving and healthcare have been the focus of every person ever since the pandemic struck. With medical centers working overtime and medical professionals exhausting themselves daily while providing care to critically ill patients, the healthcare industry needs a technology that:

  • saves up their time on documenting PHI 
  • simplifies providing care from remote locations 

As a result, vertical cloud offerings specific to the healthcare industry and an increasing number of cloud-based telehealth solutions are being proposed and adopted.  

4. New Business Operations

Majority of the world’s population has been stuck at home since 2020, which implies that almost every business cannot reach out to their clientele physically. This gave a chance to companies to come up with efficiently functioning new operations so that they can provide their customers excellent services even during such unfortunate times. 

Companies from all industries, specifically retail, e-commerce and video-streaming entertainment saw an opportunity to scale their business exponentially and cloud computing became one technology they leveraged for this purpose. New business operations surrounding online ordering, online streaming, curbside pickup, contactless deliveries etc. have been introduced since then and are being managed efficiently via cloud-based services. 

There are also several industry-specific uses of cloud services that have contributed to the technology’s accelerated adoption. For example, in the education industry numerous cloud-based platforms are being introduced and leveraged lately by colleges and schools to make collaboration between students and teachers easier. Some other examples of industries adopting cloud computing in huge numbers are banking, food delivery, manufacturing, finance and non-profits. 

Following the coronavirus pandemic, the adoption of cloud computing has increased extensively. The journey of cloud transformation has become more of a necessity than a matter of convenience for businesses today. Cloud computing has proven to be extremely valuable and handy to tackle the unprecedented affects of COVID-19 pandemic on business operations. Hence, it is safe to say that the pandemic has accelerated cloud adoption enormously.