By Natarajan Radhakrishnan

The COVID-19 pandemic has overturned everything on an unprecedented scale. However, the pandemic has proved to be a blessing in disguise for the Cloud Computing industry. Centrify, provider of Identity-Centric Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions, released new research that found nearly half of IT decision makers' companies had to accelerate their cloud migration plans and IT modernization overall during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The most agile organizations are meeting todays challenges by ramping up their use of the cloud. With companies revisiting their strategies to emerge stronger in the post-COVID world, they must find the right spots in their organizations where cloud services can increase resilience and agility. A significant benefit of using cloud is that it gives you tremendous flexibility. It can reduce cost by eliminating or reducing on-premise servers, and lets businesses scale data storage and computing power on demand.

One of the biggest advantages of cloud is that it ensures business continuity even in unforeseen circumstances. Cloud platforms can help deploy new digital customer experiences in short span and can support analytics that would be way affordable than traditional technology platforms.

In the early 2020, when governments across the globe implemented lockdown to contain the virus, organizations had to migrate to the remote working environment from the usual brick and mortar set-up to ensure business continuity. This rapid shift has resulted in massive demand of the cloud-based services. In a very short span, video conferencing apps have shown triple digit increase in business as compared to last year. All such organizations who have been using cloud were better prepared for the remote working shift compared to others.

The increasing appetite for cloud adoption is evident in the industry trends. Organizations have moved not only external but internal enterprise applications to cloud to ensure high performance and accessibility. As per recent report by PWC, cloud spending rose 37% to $29 billion during the first quarter of 2020. This trend is likely to stay, due to the surge in virtual work which requires scalable, secure, reliable, cost-effective off-premises technology services.

Despite the economic downturn in the wake of the pandemic, Gartner estimates a rise of 19% in cloud spending is estimated for the full year, even as IT spending as a whole is forecast to fall 8%.Security, data modernization, and cost are amongst the top drivers for cloud migration. A Deloitte study suggests that cloud and data modernization are highly interrelated and actually reinforce each other.

With increased focus on security and automation, businesses will be well-prepared to deploy cloud for various needs. Thorough understanding of the risks and benefits of adopting a cloud strategy can help organizations find success during the pandemic and beyond.

With COVID-19, one thing is very clear that future can be quite unpredictable which is why we must keep ourselves prepared for the unknown. Technologies which offer mobility, agility and scalability with non-negotiable security will always enable business continuity even during worse periods. Today, it is cloud amongst many other. However, given the speed of technology breakthroughs, tomorrow there will be many more.

The author is President and Global Chief Innovation Officer, HGS

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The Covid-19 has enforced businesses to rely heavily on cloud computing - ETCIO.com