As the whole world is slowly awakening from several months of complete lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, Cloud computing has started gaining even more steam it had before the pandemic. No wonder why the role of Cloud is becoming more crucial for business success nearly in every single niche and vertical. Today, companies are ready (or are forced in some cases) to go the extra mile to accelerate their pace of innovation and digital transformation. They’re craving to make a change they’ve always been apprehensive about in the pre-pandemic world. It’s becoming more apparent to businesses that digital transformation gives an excellent opportunity to not only survive in turbulent times but gain value-added benefits, too.

Let’s take a look at how Cloud optimisation can speed up and facilitate digital transformation and save costs.

How COVID-19 has affected businesses

Today, all businesses can be divided into three main categories based on how they’ve been affected by the pandemic:

• Companies specialised in eCommerce and online retail or providing essential online services like elearning, car-sharing, delivery etc. They are growing unexpectedly fast as a result of the pandemic. However, their local infrastructures were dated and not ready to handle the loads related to the influx in new users or increased number of transactions. So they have urgent short-term needs to modernise their internal systems and jump fast on the latest technology bandwagon to capitalise on the change caused by the Coronavirus.
• Companies in tourism and travel, HoReCa or offline retail. They’re taking a beating and facing substantial financial losses as a result of hibernation that the pandemic has pushed them to. These organisations are mostly focused on reducing operating costs, saving every penny and retaining as much in-house staff as possible. As such, cutting costs on IT infrastructure support is becoming critical to them.
• Companies unaffected by Corona that keep doing business as usual without any significant change.

What do all these companies have in common? Lack of clarity and understanding of what the future holds for them. No one knows now how the situation will unfold in the months to come. As a result of this frustration:

• Even companies that hit the jackpot and are doing good aren’t ready to increase their investments in IT infrastructure development and modernisation. They would lie doggo and wait rather than rush to increase their IT spending.
• Companies are shifting focus from building long-term strategies able to yield results and bring substantial benefits in 1–2 years to short-term plans able to bring more mediocre yet more tangible results in the short-run (within months or even weeks).
• Infrastructure scalability and effectiveness are becoming the top priority for the business. Organisations realise that their infrastructure should be able to adjust quickly to critical situations like we’re having now; otherwise, they won’t be able to stay afloat. Cloud allows for fast and flexible scaling while keeping costs low, as there’s no need to invest in data centers, physical servers, etc.

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