WILL FATE OF CLOUD COMPUTING CHANGE DURING THE CURRENT PANDEMIC?

Source:-analyticsinsight.net

Internet is flooded with memes about Earth being closed due to one of the biggest pandemic of the 21st century: COVID-19. While the world is hell-bent in trying to push back on novel coronavirus, Cloud Computing firms could emerge as a prominent and strong key player in this battle.

With large-scale industrial shutdowns, public lockdown taking place around the globe to contain virus spread, work from home has gained more importance than before. As people are caught up in a dilemma about what to do indoors other than connecting with family, they do forget how blessed they are than they were a decade ago. While Netflix gives us the much-needed respite, cloud computing and storage have enabled video conferencing, e-commerce shopping, remote project collaboration, gaming, online classes, editing, etc.

The remote data storage and processing services provided by Amazon, Microsoft Corp, Google, etc. act as an essential link for people to connect with workspace online. More companies, firms connecting online means more data, along with the pre-existing data about COVID-19 to ease research in the drug industry, trace origins of the virus, etc. As a result, to address growing storage issues, cloud computing saves us again. The cloud allows data interoperability in a scalable, cost-efficient manner by, data collection, processing, analyzing, and sharing across platforms.

In the health-care industry where data is one of the biggest assets, storing and managing this amount of data can be cost-prohibitive as they require expensive servers, and big space to keep them, piling up on additional expenditures. It is also observed that with Government restrictions on the opening of movie theatres, streaming sites like Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime, and Hulu have found a new audience base. On the cloud capacity COVID-19 question, Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) recently put out a statement saying that it’s confident it can meet customer demand for capacity in response to COVID-19. Facebook saw a surge in traffic for video calling and messaging. Last week, Microsoft had a 40% rise in the numbers using its software for online collaboration. Also with customers preferring to stay indoors, there was more dependency on online delivery stores for groceries and meds. Recently, the Chinese tech giant, Alibaba offered AI-powered cloud computing platform and supercomputing cluster for free to power global research institutions to accelerate viral gene-sequencing, protein-screening and other research in treating or preventing the Coronavirus. The main benefit of the cloud is flexibility. This allows companies to rent more processing horsepower and storage when required, and can also scale back during less busy periods.

As the importance of the cloud has been made abundantly clear, coronavirus pandemic is now a big driver for cloud infrastructure and platform technologies like IaaS (software solutions that enable rapid, secure and consistent deployment of application environments.) and PaaS (third party cloud computing model that allows the development of web application life-cycle: building, testing, deploying, managing and updating.) that support business-specific applications run within public cloud environments that staff will get access to from home.

Furthermore, if the pandemic continues, it will also lead to a boom in cloud stock prices. So maybe it is time to put VR headset, log into cloud services, attend conferences online or stream your favorite movie with occasional game breaks.