2020 was the year of remote work, remote learning, remote research, remote healthcare, and therapy…remote everything. Increased digital learning, e-commerce, gaming, and online streaming all contributed to the growing need for scaled cloud services.
Due to the lockdown, schools, businesses, learning institutions, and other vendors and service providers and their users have had to quickly adapt themselves to operating almost entirely online. This, in turn, has led to a surge in demand for cloud services, not just from corporate entities but also from individual users.
Last year’s revenues from cloud services hit an all-time high of $142 billion, up from $107 billion in 2019. While the increased spending isn’t unique to the pandemic period, this notable surge in revenues by almost 33% can almost be attributed to the crisis.
It isn’t the only Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) companies such as AWS that are reaping from the windfall. Software as a Service (SaaS), Backup as a Service (BaaS), and even Platform as a Service (PaaS) companies such as Facebook have also seen revenue growth during the pandemic period, with more growth expected post-pandemic.
So, what are the biggest lessons that we can learn from 2020 concerning cloud computing and its future? If you need to write a tech paper on cloud systems or any other general topic in this area, a professional essay writer from a service such as masterpapers.com can do an impeccable job for you. Such services as laweekly.com also have a great piece on some of the best services where you can get an up-to-writer.
Even Cloud Giants Aren’t Immune to Shocks
AWS, Google Cloud Services, and Microsoft Azure all faced outages at some point in the year 2020. Google admitted that its business experienced partial outages of services such as Gmail, YouTube, and Google docs in December, affecting both business and personal accounts.
In November last year, AWS also experienced outages in some of its locations last year that affected blue-chip firms such as Autodesk, Adobe, and Roku, amongst others. Some North American customers using the Azure platform were also affected by outages due to cooling failures in one of Microsoft’s data centers.
However, the most famous outage last year was suffered by Zoom, a company now synonymous with remote work and video conferencing. Zoom suffered several outages in April 2020 due to a surge in users by almost 100 million from the previous month.
The outages affecting the three biggest companies in cloud provision haven’t been directly tied to scalability issues re the pandemic. However, their occurrence within an almost similar time frame might be a pointer that, indeed, issues of scale had a role to play. The silver lining in this is that these cloud giants and other companies that run cloud-based services can begin to anticipate such shocks and scale their systems appropriately.
The Digital Cloud Transformation Is Here to Stay
The sudden increase in migration and dependency on cloud services may have been brought about by the pandemic. However, the benefits of the cloud are quite immense that even beyond the pandemic, it is expected that many businesses will entirely shift portions of their operations (or the entirety of it) to the cloud.
The grim reality of running at-scale network services was exposed by the pandemic where companies just didn’t have the infrastructure to support their operations concerning remote work. Remote work is not only an efficient model of operation if the infrastructure is right and secure.
It also offers possibilities to lower costs, increase speeds, and loss mitigation due to network or other system issues. It is thus expected that cloud services will increase in margin and efficiency with more small and commercial entities increasing their uptake.
Support Is Growing for Hybrid Clouds
With server timeouts, disk space issues, and other network or vendor problems that affect business continuity, customers are moving in search of hybrid or multi-cloud options that allow flexibility. A fluid cloud system that can allow users to migrate easily across systems allows resources to be deployed as needed and workloads balanced.
Different technical and business requirements may be required for different kinds of businesses, and the likelihood is that very few enterprises can have all their needs met by just one cloud provider.
The Takeaway
Whether it is applications, systems, storage, or speed, cloud computing opens up a whole new level of possibilities for individuals and corporate players alike. 2020 showed just how much the world needs cloud players, but it also exposed the vulnerabilities that massive systems face. The cloud will only get bigger and better, but will the risks and potential for losses increase as well? Only time will tell.
