The unprecedented outbreak of COVID-19 has debilitated businesses by impacting their productivity as well as overall economic growth across industries in almost all of the countries in the world. It has immobilized their staffs, making them work remotely from home, in several cases infrastructure being inadequate and unavailable. COVID-19 has also presented the greatest challenge of ensuring business continuity by taking care of data availability, employee engagement, and enabling business operations in such an extraordinarily unusual time. 

Businesses that do not have cloud infrastructure in place are facing challenges in pursuing reliable IT infrastructure, security requirements, compliance constraints, managerial and operational transformation, employee–client connect, and business continuity with on-time deliverables, to name a few.  

On the other hand, as COVID-19 pushes down businesses, cloud enablement helps them rise. Organizations that have already adopted cloud are minting its benefits with their business continuity even in this deadlock situation. They have cloud based business-level applications in place to maintain collaboration with their co-workers and customers, aiding smooth and continuous business stability.

Let’s take a look at a few real-time use cases on how cloud adoption across the globe over varied industries enable their business operations even in this tough times.

Manufacturing

The manufacturing industry is one of those segments that exclusively depends on huge manpower for operations. Many industrialists are estimating that the COVID-19 crisis will affect this industry the most. But, with technologies like cloud computing, machine learning, and IoT being adopted by Industry 4.0, it has brought in unconventional digitization in the manufacturing industry keeping its business running. Cloud connected machineries, equipment automation factories, and plants are reducing the need of human interaction and providing remote, secured access to the sites and operations data, barely hampering their business stability. It also helps to collaborate supply chains and manage production as per the prevalent situation.    

Research/Disaster Management

Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) combined together enable researchers to provide data to health organizations like WHO to take necessary and protective steps to control the epidemic. In this situation of COVID-19, the data scientists collect and store the data regarding virus spread pattern to perform analytics in cloud and uncover the nature of the virus, its mutations, preventive measures that can help reduce the outspread, and to know where it will likely strike next. Based on this data analytics and AI, government can take the appropriate steps to overcome/deal with these adverse circumstances.

Medical Diagnosis

In this pandemic, staying home and maintaining social distance is the best way to save everyone from the corona virus. On the other side, doctors have to treat patients who are infected with virus or other diseases. Considering the scenario, cloud connected tele-medicine/ tele-healthcare is stepping up into the spotlight and helping healthcare providers to respond to the situation. It bridges the gap between people, physicians and health systems, enabling everyone, especially symptomatic patients, to stay at home and communicate with physicians through virtual channels, helping to reduce the outbreak of the virus to mass populations and the medical staff on the frontlines. Tele-health has emerged as an effective and sustainable solution for precaution, prevention and treatment to stem the proliferation of infection.

Semiconductors

Nowadays cloud offers a secure, agile, and scalable platform with a comprehensive set of services and high-performance in computing, design, and verification over the cloud. This has encouraged semiconductor companies to adopt cloud for their businesses. In this lockdown state, semiconductors that are native to cloud computing have adopted semiconductor verification based on simulators, which creates similar to actual environment, or act like any actual devices attached to the cloud, enabling further development process. Few semiconductors also share device software/stack into shared cloud with their clients enabling continuity of business operations with customers.

Modern organizations have always counted on digital platforms and cloud infrastructure to support their businesses. With the unwelcomed restrictions of COVID-19, more companies are recognizing the unquestionable value that cloud delivers in this lockdown situation like effective employee/customer collaboration, flexibility and scalability on the go (elastic digital workplace), productivity boost, no physical presence requirement for server maintenance, secured & quick remote data access/operability, continuous deployments and much more.

About the Author

Bhargav is associated with VOLANSYS Technologies as Tech Lead over 8 years. He has experience in Cloud architecture, AWS architecture, Cloud solution development, IoT solution design & Mobile app development based on different cloud and mobile platforms.