The unprecedented outbreak of global pandemic COVID-19 has impacted businesses and economies all around the world. As we witnessed the nationwide lockdown, businesses had to make overnight changes to their operational models. They had to shift to partially or fully working-from-home staff, set up the digital infrastructure to support critical business operations, minimize downtime, and ensure data safety in a remote working environment. While the companies were at it, they had to factor in scalability, control, and agility of operations to tap future opportunities. Moving to Cloud emerged as the primary way to ensure exactly this for the businesses.

Cloud infrastructure enables business continuity amid Covid-19 in more ways than one. Businesses that had already adopted cloud have been able to use cloud-based business-level applications to collaborate with internal and external stakeholders while aiding smooth and continuous operations. Cloud Spend Management has gained relative importance in these times as. customers are likely to track their Cloud expenditure minutely, thereby reducing their Cloud cost spends. Custom applications that provide real-time and granular visibility of such spending to reduce costs are going to be important to customers. The on-demand usage versus Reserved Instances commitment costs conundrum is one that is going to be a top-of-the-mind optimization parameter for most companies, given the complex business scenario that we’re in.

While the Cloud has a wide range of applications and benefits for many sectors, we have seen major deployments across communications services, B2B software & independent software vendors (ISVs), entertainment, education, healthcare, and banking, amongst others. Businesses in these sectors are identifying unique and innovative ways to use the Cloud in order to ensure business continuity, operational excellence, cost optimization, and immense scalability.

While we talk about the limitless potential of cloud solutions, it is important to acknowledge some challenges that could be present in some cases. According to a recent IBM survey, the ease and speed at which new Cloud tools can be deployed can also make it harder for security teams to control their usage. IDC too recently suggested that an extremely distributed Cloud solutions landscape can lead to unclear ownership of the security in the cloud, allowing policy "blind spots" and potential for shadow IT to introduce vulnerabilities and misconfiguration. Thus, Cloud deployment must not be sought as an overnight job, as is widely misconceived. It rather requires an organization-wide alignment.

While the adoption of Cloud has become a prerequisite now, Companies must pay heed to ensure that their spending on Cloud is tracked and optimized to reduce redundancy and improve the resilience of their Cloud services. In our experience, we have seen companies across the globe and across sectors including FinTech, EduTech, Internet & e-Commerce, and HeathTech already having reaped benefits of optimized Cloud usage. It is high time that enterprises and the Government sector expedite their cloud adoption journey, sooner than later.

-By Deepak Mittal, CEO & Co-founder, TO THE NEW

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