An Executive’s View Of The COVID-19 Crisis: Cloud Computing Is Proving Itself

Source:-forbes.com

The recent COVID-19 crisis has spurred increased more cloud spending, according to a survey of 750 executives from Flexera. More than half, 59 percent, said their cloud usage will be higher than planned before the pandemic hit. If anything, cloud is seen as a lifesaver for businesses through a period of uncertainty, with employees suddenly scattered across a corporate diaspora. All of a sudden, all doubts about the cloud model — especially with security and hidden costs — evaporated.

That’s because cloud is providing great certainty in a time of great uncertainty. The past three months — with businesses being forced to shutter their physical locations, supply chains collapsing, and three-year strategic plans being thrown out the window — brought more uncertainty than anyone has ever seen. Most IT executives “haven’t thought their way through something this widespread with the impact that it’s having in all aspects of commerce, their organization, their employees, and their customers.” says Jay Ferro, CIO of Quikrete. In a recent chat with CXOTalk’s Michael Krigsman, Ferro referred to cloud as a “burning platform,” that it has enabled his company — as well as many others — to continue relatively unscathed through the recent COVID crisis. “The public cloud has protected a lot of us during this situation,” he relates. “It has allowed us to continue,” he says. “It’s allowed business continuity to happen more smoothly.”

That “burning platform” has enabled Ferro — and the many fellow executives he has talked with — “to put in more automation, faster and more remote access to data, more decision-making at the edge,” he says. In the process, the crisis brought “a tremendous amount of visibility to IT. All eyes are on technology. How do we access our information; how do we conduct business?”

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Cloud has provided the foundation for such unprecedented adaptability, Ferro continues. “Whether it’s a Microsoft 365 implementation, Azure, AWS, or anything similar, it has allowed CIOs a greater degree of flexibility, because their compute is no longer on-prem, and they’re not bound by physically accessing a data center. I’ve talked to companies that have nearly 100 percent of their employees working remotely. They are grateful that they have access to that information in a platform-agnostic way, whether it’s on their laptop or their mobile device, that they’re able to continue to do business.”

This is certainly one of those eras in which “leaders are born in trial by fire, and this is a time for CIOs to step up,” Ferro adds. “This is the time for leaders to show that they understand not just disaster recovery, business continuity, but also understand how their company works day-to-day, and have a grasp of the company’s operations. I’m hoping a lot of lights go on in those CFOs’ heads and those heads of operations. I think it’s going to open some eyes for the CIO that takes advantage of the opportunity.”

Hardened attitudes toward cloud computing have also softened. “I have heard so many business executives, non-IT folks, who have gone from anti-cloud, now saying ‘Why don’t we have everything in the cloud?’”

This has also been a time for forward-looking executives to demonstrate how their efforts to digitize operations and channels in recent years have shone in a time of great adversity. “During the good times, the leaders lead from behind,” Ferro explains. “Our job during a crisis is to lead from the front as CIOs in these tough times. I want to deflect heat and all of those things away from my team so that they can focus on serving our customers and serving our staff, who are doing the hard work of keeping a company going.”