Now is the time to accelerate cloud adoption and bring increased flexibility to your organisation

We are living in a strange time. The coronavirus outbreak is changing the way people live their daily lives and interact with each other. It is also impacting how businesses operate, as employees work from home and the state of supply chains fluctuates unpredictably. With the world as it is, how can your company continue to run successfully? One technology that should not be overlooked during the coronavirus outbreak is cloud computing.

For years, the cloud has provided businesses with the resources necessary to remotely process large amounts of data, build and run mission-critical applications and services, and collaborate with partners across the globe. Now that companies must confront the realities of our ‘new normal’ and its business impact, users should turn to cloud computing to mitigate the effects that the pandemic will undoubtedly bring today and for the future. 

In this blog we have listed the ways that companies can use cloud computing to shield themselves from the damage coronavirus will cause for today and long after the pandemic ends.

Enabling remote work for employees:

Work from home is here to stay. The future of jobs after the pandemic is a blurry mix of work, life, home life and Zoom. Despite all the distractions at home, having employees work remotely more might be beneficial for employers and workers alike. It looks increasingly as if the situation will not ever go back to how it was: many employees for companies who have sent all staff home are already starting to question why they had to go into the office in the first place. Millions of people have had the chance to experience days without long commutes, or the harsh inflexibility of not being able to stay close to home when a family member is sick. This might be a chance for a great reset in terms of how we work, and cloud-based solutions can be accessed from anywhere in the world; all an employee needs is a device to access the company’s cloud environment. 

Offloading resource management:

When employees are working from home, they cannot access in-office resources (unless your company allows remote user access to company servers). Because of this, businesses need a way to give workers the resources they need to run corporate applications and services. With cloud solutions, this is already taken care of. Cloud servers host mission-critical apps without putting a strain on local resources, which also relieves the stress of storage space on user devices. This is also useful for voice and video communications — critical tools for maintaining communication outside of the office, but also tools that can put a large strain on resources.

Using online collaboration tools

While they are not working in the office, employees still need a way to collaborate with each other on projects. Cloud-based development solutions allow users to work on the same resources even when they are not in the same physical location. At the most basic level, a company should have a communication tool so employees can talk to each other in real-time. More advanced solutions allow users to collaborate on documents and projects from anywhere and are worth deploying if your company does not use them already.

Operating online shops during peak times

For a specific example, retail shops are feeling a massive strain on their infrastructure thanks to the coronavirus. Plenty of customers will initially stock up on food, but after this period, those same customers will stay at home — but may still require materials. They will turn to online shops to get what they need, and when a huge chunk of the population is doing this at once, you need to ensure your website will be able to handle the stress. Making sure your website can scale up to meet the additional demands during peak times is essential; this means that your customers will continue to be happy as they transition away from in-store shopping.

How we can help

At Hosts we believe that the outbreak could be part of the drive that takes us towards a more cloud-first always virtualised world of computing. 

Any time you have this type of scenario, be it a pandemic, or a natural disaster, business priorities take on a new focus. One will certainly be about business continuity as people focus on enabling remote work from anywhere. This experience will be a stronger accelerant to a cloud-first world and a SaaS-first world that will put further pressure on the traditional datacentre world.

Hosts Unlimited specialises in cloud computing services and solutions by providing businesses of all sizes with robust and reliable cloud computing. Our public, private and hybrid cloud services allow us to provide a tailored solution for any given requirement and budget. If you need some support with how you store, access, secure and back up your business applications and the data that resides within them you can trust our experts to take care of it.