Top cloud trends that can fuel business recovery during the pandemic

Business continuity has been a top priority for organisations during the pandemic. Corporations are doing everything to stay chin-up and most have the cloud to thank for. Last year’s events in a way coerced CIOs to relocate mission-critical works from premises to the cloud.

Cloud spending increased globally as emerging technologies such as virtualisation and edge computing took centre stage. The pandemic served as a force multiplier for the cloud. It is expected that the worldwide public cloud end-user spend will grow by 23% in 2021.

Now that most businesses have gone into the cloud, the world is faced with the question as to how organisations can leap towards business recovery with the ongoing pandemic.

Let us take up a few solutions. Containerisation can help reduce costs on virtual machines. At the cost of a single virtual machine, businesses can now deploy multiple containers with different applications, thus spreading the cost across multiple apps. If they do not have multiple apps, the same app can be deployed in multiple containers for autoscaling, aiding higher performance and availability.

Further, automation in CI/CD pipelines can help businesses cut down manpower costs for maintaining applications. With edge locations across the globe, content can be quickly delivered to end-users from their nearest point. Content delivery through edge locations can also deliver better throughput for businesses without deployment costs.

A key benefit of the cloud is its unique capability to be elastic. Organisations that can reserve instances for longer periods in advance, can save cost by at least 50%. Virtual workspaces provide the flexibility to expand workforces and systems on a need-basis. SMEs can largely benefit from the virtual workspace as it improves cost savings and operational efficiency even during heavy resource fluctuations.

By autoscaling on the server-side, e-commerce businesses running B2B and B2C applications can save a lot as they will be billed for servers based on customer usage. This autoscaling feature helps in predictable costs directly proportional to customer demand, providing complete cost transparency upfront.

The availability of on-demand data processing servers can help businesses to crunch AI and machine learning based data, arrive at models, and solve problems at costs directly proportional to usage. Data-intensive businesses can move to the cloud using such elastic and scalable/de-scalable infra servers for a cost.

Businesses frequently need to use a variety of software tools and patterns. With the availability of efficient work schedule platforms like Lambda, Payload and workload elasticity management tools, the gap between on-premise tools and cloud-based tools has been closed from several standpoints including performance, quality, software availability, and software processes.

With the availability of infrastructure automation templates such as Terraform, businesses can quickly build infrastructure without heavy cost investments. Businesses running mission-critical production applications heavily bank on Availability and Disaster Recovery. With the availability of servers from public cloud providers across different global locations, organisations can be assured of High Availability and Disaster Recovery with confidence.

The major selling points for Cloud are scalability, flexibility, efficiency, and savings. If all these could be achieved along with robust security in compliant cloud infrastructure, business recovery would be a finger-snap, and it looks promising this 2021.

The author is Raj Srinivas, CTO, SecureKloud Technologies