Work from home accelerates migration to cloud services

Microsoft has seen a significant increase in Teams usage and a three times growth in usage of Windows Virtual Desktop. IBM is seeing demand growing specifically from healthcare, education, telecom and retail industries.

During the first two weeks of the nationwide lockdown, open cloud provider Linode saw demand spike almost 100%, which has since settled to a roughly 75% increase.

“The fundamental value proposition of the cloud is in providing scale and elasticity to adapt to client demands and spikes in application usage, like we are seeing now. We have seen many firms move to all-encompassing work from home without much interruption in large part because of the cloud,” said Lingraju Sawkar, general manager, global technology services, IBM India and South Asia.

Providing virtual desktop access to employees, expanding current virtual private network (VPN) capabilities and providing collaboration capabilities aimed at giving immediate relief from unexpected disruption are some of the cloud-based services that are in high demand.

Even after the lockdown lifts and things return to normal, organizations will be forced to consider digital transformation as part of their DNA as it will prepare them for exigencies.

“A lot of the capabilities established as a reaction to the crisis will eventually become the new normal. Once the lockdown is lifted, we will see businesses leveraging these capabilities in customer outreach and servicing in a larger scale,” said Anoop Nambiar, partner, Deloitte India.

Many organizations will have to cut costs because of the financial impact of the crisis. Market analytics firm International Data Corporation, in an April report, estimated that worldwide IT spending will decline by 2.7% in 2020 because of the impact of covid-19. Will it disrupt the pace of cloud adoption?

“There will be a temporary dip in demand as people will mobilize whatever liquidity they have. Many projects will be put on the back-burner. But fundamental initiatives aro-und secure access, seamless connectivity, team collaboration and productivity trackers will scale significantly,” said Lux Rao, director, solutions and consulting, NTT India.

―Livemint