Karan Chhabra is the CEO of Servetel, RTDS’s India division. RTDS is a one-stop destination for business communication and account solutions, within the realm of cloud telephony. Under the young CEO’s leadership, Servetel’s employee strength has grown from two to 65.
The mere mention of the pandemic evokes thoughts of disruptions. COVID-19 indeed rendered a significant impact on businesses across sectors. While some had to shut down their operations, others diverted their efforts towards treading on the path of innovation. Needless to say, organizations that have survived the pandemic are forever transformed.
The question that arises is: how did they cope with the disruption? And the answer is simple—they welcomed cloud-based technology with open arms.
COVID-19: The driving force behind cloud adoption
Cloud-powered solutions have existed for quite a while now—firms were already moving to the cloud way before the pandemic and social distancing became a part of our daily conversations.
As per Everest Group’s report in 2019, 90% of enterprises at the global level had already adopted the technology in some form or the other. However, Accenture’s report from the same year states that most enterprises had only 20 to 40% of their workloads in the cloud, and these were easier, less complex ones.
The pandemic expedited the adoption of the cloud. According to PwC, cloud spending rose 37% to $29 billion during the first quarter of 2020. Gartner offers similar reports, observing that the pandemic era witnessed a surge in the usage of new-age cloud-based tools, specifically in the Indian market.
Cloud’s transition from a back-end solution to the forefront driver of businesses
It is safe to say that owing to the cloud computing environment, companies across the globe have been able to undergo colossal digital transformations. The cloud emerged at the forefront as a solution meant to drive businesses forward.
Whether it is enabling a remote setup, seamless transition to the work-from-home model, or facilitating both internal and external communication, the cloud tackled all the roadblocks that came in the path of business survival.
A business-friendly technology, it enabled on-demand access to resources, offered operational flexibility, easy scalability, and business continuity—all of this at reduced costs.
The pandemic induced transformation of the cloud market
While the cloud helped businesses transition to a remote-friendly environment, the cloud-based tech industry underwent quite a transformation itself.
A Gartner study states that the worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 23.1% in 2021 to total $332.3 billion, up from $270 billion in 2020. This isn’t surprising owing to the fact that the cloud offers everything that companies had been looking for while adopting remote working.
The technology provides high availability, quick connections, instant recovery, remote workforce management and business agility. Better yet, it lends all these strengths to businesses and teams of all sizes and industries.
Even the public sector is recognising these benefits and government departments are adopting it for government-to-citizen (g2C) programmes.
Additionally, cloud-powered solutions are delivered over the Internet as pay-as-you-go services, eliminating the need for bulky legacy systems. Thus, businesses are able to reduce capital expenses and direct their IT spending to manageable operational expenses.
Even when it comes to operational efficiency, cloud automation takes over processes like regular data backups, security breach detection and data protection, workflow and pipeline automation, and much more.
And in a world that is becoming increasingly sensitive to sustainability, the cloud is the answer to the problem of carbon footprints. It offers effective server utilisation, greater workload flexibility, and cost-and-energy-efficient infrastructure. Reports suggest that migrating to the cloud can reduce carbon footprint by around 80%.
The road ahead
According to Technavio’s report, the global cloud migration services market is expected to grow by $7.1 billion by the end of 2024 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 24%. The report further adds that the Asia Pacific region is one of the fastest-growing regions with India being a key emerging market.
Cloud application services are expected to be the biggest market with approximate spending of $1.3 billion by the end of 2021 while cloud infrastructure services are projected to witness the highest growth at 44.6% with estimated spending of $1.1 billion.
This will happen solely because businesses have realised the power of cloud-based technology. Furthermore, new-age technologies will increasingly foray into the cloud ecosystem and transform the landscape altogether.
To Conclude
The pandemic rendered a positive impact on the cloud technology space. It accelerated the adoption of cloud computing amongst businesses during the COVID-19 times.
Cloud-based solutions helped businesses embark on the journey of digital transformation and enabled them to survive through the testing times. They are now considered the backbone of multiple tech innovations and the steering wheel of business operations.
Hence, we can rightly say that the pandemic has helped cloud computing technology receive long-due credit.