Will COVID-19 accelerate adoption of multi-cloud in India?

India has been no stranger to disruption. Over the past few years, droughts and floods, water scarcity, toxic levels of air pollution, and city-wide bandhs, have tested our people and required the country to stay resilient.

In 2020, here we are once again, faced with a crisis that has already closed down our schools, offices, and local businesses, limited our travel across borders, and severely impacted our day-to-day lives.

With increased restrictions on movement, and the congregation of people, and with employee well-being remaining a priority, most companies have begun to operate their business remotely. Overnight, India has become one of the world’s largest “work from home” markets.

And, the technology that is facilitating it, cloud computing, has the potential to change the way we work for good.​

Until now, work from home was not the norm- it was the alternative. Not all companies offered this flexibility. However, COVID-19 has made work-from-home mainstream in a matter of weeks. And the outbreak has not only forced, but accelerated India’s shift to the cloud.

Technology companies now have a range of on the shelf, ready to deploy, pan cloud solutions that can be made available in hours (compared to days and months) to help customers operate more efficiently in these unpredictable times. Digital transformation that once may have taken years is now in full flow – across every city and every sector.

VDI and DaaS are perfect examples of how cloud technology is helping keep India’sbusinesses running during the outbreak.

And, the influence of cloud looks set to continue. As per IDC's Cloud Pulse 2Q19 survey findings, 75% of organizations in India had plans to invest in cloud-based infrastructure and applications to meet their business goals.

However, given the current situation and priority to keep the country’s economic engine running - those figures may soon be outdated and obsolete.

In the past, India has displayed a tendency to leapfrog over the traditional technology development process to adopt current best practices.

The government has seen the value in rapidly shifting to the cloud, even more so in light ofthe current threat. The ‘COVID 19 Solution Challenge’ is an initiative by the Govt in which people are encouraged to share technology driven solutions for COVID-19 with an incentive of winning 1 lakh.

Like so many technological innovations sometimes it takes a crisis to develop or accelerate adoption. It seems that COVID-19 is no exception. Cloud – once seen as a nice to have addition to our business portfolio, is now an accepted must have.

Faced with shutting down production and isolating a workforce at home our businesses have raced to innovate and find a solution.

Like many aspects of our digital world, the speed to market, awareness, acceptance and then time to adoption is becoming shorter. Recent experience has shown us that once we embrace a new technology, our outlook changes, and it is quickly normalised – it becomes our accepted way of doing business.

So, it seems unlikely that once the current COVID-19 disruption is over India’s businesses will abandon the cloud and their new way of working in favour of their traditional model.

The future for a multi-cloud India looks certain, and its arrival may already be here.

-- Balakrishnan Anantharaman, SVP and MD-Sales, India and SAARC, Nutanix