How COVID-19 Has Impacted The Cloud Computing Industry
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted businesses and the lives of people in a significant way. However, cloud computing is one industry that has gained a great deal of strength. Facebook recordings have surged beyond the increases seen on New Year’s Eve and the number of new Netflix subscribers has doubled. This shows how important the World Wide Web and the ecosystem surrounding it have become over the past few months. In this post, we will try to understand how the pandemic has impacted the cloud industry and the providers are adjusting to the surge in demand for their services.
Digital Solutions for Maintaining Productivity
In the wake of the pandemic, social distancing is in force and physical interaction is, therefore, not possible at all. This has forced institutions and enterprises all over the world to turn to digital solutions in order to maintain their productivity levels. In the US and many parts of Europe, people working for non-essential businesses have been asked to work from their homes for an indefinite period. Schools and universities are making use of video conferencing platforms for delivering live as well as recorded lectures.
This, in turn, has led to an unprecedented increase in the use of collaborative solutions such as Zoom and Slack. Microsoft’s team collaboration product saw a 775 percent jump in monthly usage in Italy during March following the implementation of lockdown measures and its virtual desktop offering registered a 300 percent increase in usage.
Catering to People’s Entertainment Needs During the Pandemic
Movie theaters have been closed down to curtail the spread of the coronavirus and this forced people to make use of cloud-based video streaming services like Amazon Prime and Netflix for watching movies and other shows. Netflix reported a 60 percent, 30 percent, and 9 percent increases in app downloads in Italy, Spain, and the US, respectively. American telecom company Verizon said that the usage of video games during peak hours zoomed by 75 percent in the week after the lockdown was imposed. Nielsen’s SuperData Research showed that spending on the purchase of video games rose by 11 percent on a yearly basis in March 2020. In the following month, Twitch, the video live streaming service of Amazon, reported that an all-time high number of 1.7 million people viewed a single game.
Many ISPs around the world were unable to cope with the surge in demand. Indian and European regulators even requested Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon to temporarily cut down the quality of their HD content.
Growth of the E-commerce Industry
Another industry that is experiencing tremendous growth during the pandemic is the e-commerce sector. In an effort to reduce their exposure to the virus and distance themselves from others, a large number of people have started shopping from online retail platforms. Nielsen’s trend survey confirms the surge in the e-commerce industry.
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon generate revenues through their cloud and e-commerce services and software licenses. Therefore, COVID-19 is unlikely to significantly impact the profits of these companies. Further, companies belonging to other sectors have started realizing the beneficial effects of cloud computing. This is likely to encourage companies to boost their investments in cloud services. The end to the pandemic continues to be elusive and businesses are forced to work around quarantine and social distancing constraints with the help of technology to keep the economic activity going. As such, investing in cloud computing is fast becoming a necessity.
Zerone HiTech is one of the top systems integration companies in Qatar and offers IT products and cloud computing solutions to cater to the needs of small and large enterprises. Further, Zerone is a Microsoft Partner for implementing their cloud solutions in Qatar and has helped many companies resolve issues such as data migration, online DMS development, and archiving existing data on the cloud, among others.
