As the digital economy grows, companies across the world need to keep up with the pace of technological change – so that they can constantly meet the demands of modern customers.
Cloud computing has, since its inception, enabled software delivery organizations to improve business agility and resiliency. Through on-demand access to technology & software, it has provided teams with the flexibility and scale needed to accelerate time-to-market.
Although the Cloud has been a blessing for companies from the beginning, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to completely transform the business landscape, the significance of the Cloud has grown manifold.
The Impact of COVID-19 to the Business World
Just as organizations across the world were going about their daily business, the COVID-19 pandemic brought everything to a screeching halt! Cities went into complete lockdowns, businesses closed, and a majority of the global workforce suddenly was forced to work from home.
Managing this massive remote workforce and providing them the tools and resources they need to build cutting-edge products isn’t easy. With shrinking employee confidence levels, lack of crisis-resilient processes in place, and no robust plan to maintain status-quo, organizations across the world are finding it difficult to carry on their business and sustain growth and revenue.
How Cloud Enables Remote Working
The Cloud offer teams integrated development environments, ALM, and CI/CD components that allow for quicker and more efficient software development outcomes. Collaboration amongst other teams is also enabled, and expanded, when hosting on the cloud.
In this time of crisis, the Cloud can ensure teams have access to the resources and tools they need and also have the ability to seamlessly scale so that development efficiency is maintained.
Moving workloads to the Cloud not only reduces the pressure on on-prem systems, but it also enables seamless remote working by providing:
- Scalability: One of the biggest benefits that the Cloud provides during the COVID-19 crisis is the scalability of resources. With most businesses suffering large losses in the wake of the pandemic, they are struggling to cut costs wherever they can. Moving workloads to the Cloud is a great way to scale resources based on demand, without burning a hole in the company’s pocket. Since organizations only need to pay for the resources they use, they can bring down their operational expenditure by a large margin – while continuing to meet business goals with agility.
- Accessibility: Cloud tools make it possible for employees to work from anywhere, at any time, using the device of their choice. Unlike proprietary on-prem systems, where resources were locked in silos, the Cloud assimilates all important data and documents it in a single repository. It makes it easy for employees to access everything through a modern web or mobile interface. Through seamless access to always-on, always updated tools and resources, the Cloud helps employees maintain their productivity and efficiency.
- Flexibility: As more and more employees work from home, the Cloud provides the flexibility needed to seamlessly incorporate new features, quickly make changes, perform tests and deploy products. The remote workforce can leverage the Cloud to use the tools and resources needed to do their jobs and also scale them to keep up with the demand. Employees can make the most of the unlimited storage capacity and scale up operations – with predictable monthly payments. In times like these, the Cloud offers the required level of workforce mobility, allowing employees to be more flexible working from home.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Having a mechanism in place that makes communication and collaboration easy while working from home is extremely crucial. As this global calamity changes every aspect of business operations, the Cloud is a great tool for enhancing collaboration. By using the Cloud, teams can access a central repository of project plans, files, and tools while staying abreast with project progress. They can work together on documents, communicate with peers in real-time, and edit and share content for everyone to see. For example, by using Addteq’s cloud-based Excellentable app, users can create dynamic and interactive spreadsheets directly in Confluence. This helps teams to collaborate easily and save time toggling through applications.
- Increased Security: A pandemic like COVID-19 is an ideal time for malicious cyber threats to take advantage – especially as more and more employees use their personal devices and networks to access corporate data. The Cloud, through its standard security measures such as multi-factor authentication, data encryption, and data security; ensure that data stays safe, even when employees are accessing corporate systems remotely. With robust business continuity plans in place, the Cloud ensures periodic backup of data, so the business can operate as-is – even as the pandemic toughens its grip across the world.
- Opportunities for Innovation: As businesses’ struggle to maintain profitability and innovation is at the core of competitiveness within the new business landscape. With employees working from home, rigid, on-premise technology can no longer serve to meet their needs; it is the Cloud that helps keep the enterprise connected while continuously paving the way for innovation opportunities. It empowers organizations to rapidly prototype, develop, and deploy products, extend new features while simplifying ease of use, design better customer journeys that are suited to unique preferences and contexts, and gain entry into new industries or markets.
- Opportunities for Automation: In addition to providing on-demand services that scale dynamically to meet demands, the Cloud also decreases the manual effort needed to provision and manage workloads. For a remote workforce, the Cloud allows for automation across a number of business aspects, like: teams can launch IT infrastructure automatically, auto-scale workloads, and adapt to actual operating environments. The cloud also provides access to dev/test environments that are automatically provisioned – to reduce human errors, construct more predictable workflows, and bring products to market sooner.
As the world reels from the unexpected and unprecedented COVID-19 crisis, migrating to the Cloud is the only way to ensure products and services continue to be securely available – for employees as well as customers.
Are you ready to move to the cloud?
