Although cloud adoption has been on the rise in the last decade, the Covid-19 pandemic has emerged as a primary driver for accelerating cloud adoption. Despite the global uncertainty and volatility, investments in cloud solutions have increased rapidly as organizations pursue resilience, agility, and scalability through technology.
When it comes to the Covid crisis, organizations of all sizes and industry verticals are adopting the cloud in some form. Industry laggards and traditional businesses are finding compelling use cases for cloud adoption: remote working, centralized information access, and continuous communication, all while operating an optimal tradeoff between CapEx and OpEx for highly scalable infrastructure resources.
In essence, the pandemic represents a fundamental shift in the way we work, encouraging organizations to transform their operating models. Let’s review how different elements of the pandemic have caused unprecedented growth in cloud adoption:
Embracing the Hybrid Work Model
By following the remote working model, employees store and access sensitive business information from consumer-grade devices that are potentially vulnerable to security risks. Before the pandemic, most organizations discouraged the remote work model in its entirety — employee presence at the workplace was necessary to access internal resources.
During the pandemic, most organizations adopted the Work From Home model and required the means to offer secure access to centralized cloud systems running sensitive information workloads and business software.
Traditional Operating Models are replaced with Digital Processes
Business organizations have responded with equal vigor, replacing traditional operating models with digital processes in pursuit of true digital transformation. Cloud computing is at the heart of digital transformation, enabling new business models, service workflows, and opportunities to interact with information, services, and individuals within the digital modes of operation.
According to recent research, 58% of digital leaders believe that the pandemic has accelerated their digital transformation journey, with 46% considering cloud computing as a top strategically important technology to scale digital transformation activities.
Resilient Cloud Infrastructure and Business Continuity
In the digital age, the cost of downtime averages $1-5 million per hour for at least half of the organizations that experience a service outage according to a recent report by Information Technology Intelligence Consulting Corp (ITIC). Even for smaller organizations with a maximum of 50 employees, the hourly cost of downtime is approximately $50k-100k. Service availability and business continuity are the key concerns among business organizations adopting the work-from-home model.
In this context, business continuity has emerged as a necessary imperative, which is readily achievable in a cloud environment. The cloud infrastructure is built for resilience – redundant infrastructure resources, software-defined architecture, and service level agreements that guarantee high availability to ensure business continuity, thereby pushing cloud adoption during the pandemic.
Scalability and Flexibility
Since the start of the pandemic, organizations are leaning toward advanced data-driven technologies that provide answers to some of the key business questions amid ongoing global uncertainty. They want to understand exactly how the changing market landscape is affecting customer behavior; how bottlenecks in the supply chain and distribution channels can be eliminated; how new business models, product features and services can maximize the value potential of their business in the digital age.
Cloud computing is instrumental in provisioning infrastructure resources at scale and flexibility, allowing organizations to create and experiment with new business models, product features and business decisions powered by data.
Increased Demands for Talent
Digital transformation and the shift toward the remote working model has created unprecedented demand on talent and skilled workforce. Many technology executives consider skills shortage as one of the greatest barriers to software modernization and expanding cloud environments. In the age where skills shortage is a prevalent risk to business growth, organizations are increasingly employing skilled individuals from distant geographic locations. This makes remote working a necessary solution to address the skills shortage.
Cloud computing is critical to enabling both the digital transformation initiatives as well as means to fill the talent gap. From the perspective of business organizations, the choice is largely focused on planning and execution of the right cloud migration strategy. One of the key reasons associated with the complexity and challenges around cloud migration is the lack of planning, inadequate expertise and failure to execute an effective cloud migration program.
For this reason, Directeam offers cloud migration services with an outcome-driven methodology by addressing the security and compliance issues, complexity of operational changes and maximizing the cost efficiency. We achieve these goals by adopting the following process:
- At the assessment stage, we identify challenges, problems, and failures. We examine the challenges in a holistic way, tailor the migration process, modernize apps and develop a cloud architecture that meets long-term goals of your business.
- We follow an agile approach to execute the cloud migration program. This results in an accelerated infrastructure modernization process that is scalable and future-proof in the digital era. We align the cloud migration project with your business goals and requirements, through financial planning and resource allocation that ensures a cost-effective digital transformation journey.
- Directeam is an AWS trusted advisor capable of executing the end-to-end AWS cloud migration process, in line with the guidelines and best-practices set forth by the cloud vendor itself.
- Our proven track record in cloud migration through the AWS Migration Acceleration Program ensures 40% cloud infrastructure savings, 70% improved cloud Infrastructure Management and 90% reduction in unplanned downtime.
Ultimately, the comprehensive cloud migration program leads to increased business agility as our customers adopt a cloud-driven digital transformation journey.