CLOUD ADOPTION DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

When stay-at-home orders rolled out, businesses were faced with new challenges as employees began working remotely. Companies who were unprepared for the WFH surge struggled to stay afloat and maintain productivity during the pandemic. Cloud technology emerged as the most efficient solution for businesses to continue to thrive.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, the immense changes in our way of life happened instantly. One day, employees were commuting to work and networking over lunch meetings. The next day, employees were hunkering down at home, conducting all their meetings via Zoom or Microsoft Teams. Many companies were unprepared for such a dramatic change in the landscape of office work, but the ones with data centers or physical servers were hit hardest.

Teams, companies, and entire industries needed to evolve to maintain productivity and maintain operations as weeks turned into months. This is when we saw the momentous shift to embracing cloud technology. We’ve long touted the benefits of migrating to the cloud. Still, now we’re seeing companies implement the technology only to find that it offers them so much more flexibility than they could have imagined.

Here is what we saw when the coronavirus hit the U.S.

Issues

Perhaps the most impactful issue we saw when the country moved to remote work is that the companies with on-site, physical servers or data centers faced challenges from the beginning. Suddenly, those servers couldn’t be reached because employees were forced to work from home – data, files, and applications were inaccessible, and work could not get done.

Not only that, but any IT issues, repairs, or backups needed to happen on-site. IT teams had no choice but to continue monitoring and servicing the physical hardware of the in-office servers in person. Any security issues that arose became challenging to address with employees working from everywhere and many companies had no standard operating procedures for logging into physical servers. Circumstances that made it impossible to service these servers, whether in a quarantine zone or businesses in the building experienced positive coronavirus cases, meant that businesses had no way of accessing or managing their data. This made it extremely hard, if not impossible, to continue business as usual.

Collaboration, which previously happened in the office, came to a halt within companies that were not already using cloud technology to share and edit files and data. The lack of Voice over IP (VoIP) phone systems meant that phone calls were left unanswered. Rising from the need to work together and gain access to important files, data, and communication, cloud adoption rose at an astronomical pace as we entered our “new normal.”

This caused a mass exodus from private servers to many companies leveraging cloud technology in some way to continue doing business during a worldwide pandemic.

Implications

While the pandemic fueled this abrupt acceptance of cloud technology as the new operating standard, many industries will look back at the profound innovations and benefits that emerged from the hysteria. For years, many people were wary of turning to the cloud to store all their private data, but today’s companies are learning the true value of cloud technology.

Cloud computing solutions are perhaps the only viable solution during this crisis as they offer fixed costs, allow real-time collaboration and data access, and the provider handles administrative and security tasks related to data protection and management.

These are just a few instantly recognizable benefits of moving over to the cloud. We’ve covered the cloud extensively in past articles, “Ways to use the Cloud for your Small Business,” and “Benefits of Migrating to the Cloud.”

Industries

There is no industry left untouched by this pandemic, and cloud technology can be used in every one of them. Perhaps the industry that had to evolve most rapidly was healthcare, as our population’s safety and well-being relied on health services. Just because the pandemic hit didn’t mean that other individuals were no longer experiencing other health issues and while resources were being diverted to COVID treatment and testing, the rest of the industry had to evolve too. We saw healthcare leverage the cloud more than ever, through new and improved services like telehealth. The cloud gave healthcare facilities the ability to access patients remotely by providing telemedicine options that also aligned with data protection standards and HIPPA compliance.

Education was another sector that was turned upside down during the pandemic, and school districts who didn’t have e-learning in place were forced to keep their classrooms connected while students, teachers, and administrators had to stay at home. Learning couldn’t stop, and assignments and testing continued with cloud technology’s help while protecting the student’s data and providing reliable, failsafe systems that could be used in the cloud.

While these are just two examples, the industries impacted by COVID-19 are widespread. Nearly all of those industries can take advantage of cloud technology to streamline their operations and maintain peak efficiency even while workers are scattered across the country.

What Comes Next?

The way businesses interact with technology and data in a post-COVID-19 era looks vastly different than we could have imagined at the beginning of 2020. Companies are more open to hosting data virtually, and those that already started their migration to the cloud are accelerating their migration. The Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report shows that businesses of all sizes are using the cloud at a higher rate than they had planned before COVID-19. That trend will likely continue throughout 2020 and into the future.

Key takeaway: The cloud is here to stay, and Level4 IT is leading the charge

Any applications, data, or other programs that need to be accessed at any time by employees need to be on the cloud. Now that more and more professionals are working from home, that seamless level of connectivity and instant access to real-time data is essential to driving successful business operations. We’ve seen businesses adapt and move over to the cloud faster than we’ve ever seen before as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we are prepared and ready to help you move your data operations to the cloud.

Level4 IT is continuously evolving to build out services that meet your needs, including proprietary solutions tailored to your business. We offer Private Cloud IT Services which includes server hosting at our secure data center and Cloud IT support. We always strive to keep your business current with the latest technologies, so you aren’t left out to dry in the event of a significant catastrophe. Security remains central to everything we do. We understand how important your data is, and we propose viable solutions that innately protect your business information and resources. Contact us today to see the wealth of digital solutions we can offer to meet your business needs, even as they continue to change.

About Us

Level4 IT is a Computer and IT Management company located in Schaumburg, IL. We provide Cloud-IT Services, Computer Management, Server Management, Internet & Cyber Security, Data Backups, Cloud Services, and Technical Support for Small & Midsize companies.

Our focus is to help businesses stay safe on the internet while providing ongoing Technical Management, Consulting, and Support. We help our clients stay ahead of the competition.

Contact us at 888-831-6412 or email us at info@level4it.com.