Cloud and how it might help at difficult times

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The recent changes caused by the virus and economic meltdown affected almost everybody in the world. We are all now going through a difficult period of our history, and when many companies are struggling to survive, the other thrive and boost production. In such a volatile environment, it becomes more and more important to be able to adapt to the IT environment to immediate business needs quickly.

We work with different customers helping to adjust and evolve according to the changing business and IT landscape. It touches a lot of various aspects of IT, such as software and hardware support, logistic, availability of stuff, and restrictions put by government authorities.

n one case, we had to solve the puzzle of logistics to be able to replace some faulty parts of critical infrastructure in the conditions when the vendor didn’t have a physical representation in the location. In normal times the engineer would fly over to replace the part, had a night in a hotel, and fly back. Sounds easy, right? Now, when most of the flights are cancelled, all the hotels in the vicinity are closed, and borders have backlogs of people trying to cross that’s not easy anymore. We were able to work it out, but it was difficult and took much more time than expected. During all that time, the environment was using redundant parts, but it could be a disaster if any of those parts would break.

Another case I saw when one of the businesses’ total workload went from 80% of IT capacity to almost zero. At the same time, the company should keep the infrastructure up, pay for electricity, cooling, data centers’ rent, and the license support. All those money could be saved if the company could temporarily reduce the number of licenses and computers according to real business needs.

And we all know about some companies expanding and growing due to growing demands. For example, usage of Zoom has ballooned overnight, reaching more than 200 million daily users. Some other companies providing delivery and remote services were also experienced significant growth and unexpected load on the IT infrastructure. Some of them were unable to take it well, and their online services crashed.

I think this is the time when the cloud-based solutions show how it can be done and how the cloud can help businesses to be more flexible, agile, and keep up with demands. Let me list some benefits of putting your critical IT to a public cloud.

In first, you don’t need to think and jump over your head to fix your IT infrastructure when all supply chains and regular logistics are broken. Make it somebody’s problem and not yours anymore.

You can quickly scale down your environment reducing infrastructure subscription cost and licensing cost, which is probably even more important for some types of licensing software. So, your already strangled business will not need to endure keeping afloat massive infrastructure which is not used by anyone. Good examples are air company and recreational industry.

At the same time, if you have designed and built your environment in and for the cloud, you can scale up and scale out supporting growing demands for your business. You can think about well-known retail chains for hardware and home supplies.

And speaking about the time, it can be the best moment for changes when your infrastructure is down, and you can afford prolonged maintenance for your IT infrastructure. For the others, it is the best opportunity to rethink the business model and orient it more to remote delivery and online retail.

I’ve listed here only a few reasons why the cloud is better and more adapted to the changes in the business. But cloud provides some other benefits and opportunities to improve your analytics and apply modern machine learning technics adding even more value to your data.

That is true that some cloud providers experienced serious capacity problems during the first days of the increased demands, but so far, they have been able to overcome and fix most of the issues for their enterprise customers.
As a final word, I would like to say that we are ready to help you to go through that difficult time and ready to share our experience and knowledge. The world is changing, and we are changing with it.

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