Cloud and Hosting27.07.2020

How COVID-19 has made the cloud crucial to success

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The global COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need for businesses to move to the cloud, and those already on it have found the COVID-19 pandemic easier to navigate.

This is according to George Thabit, Senior Solutions Manager of Huawei Cloud Africa Region, who was speaking at the Huawei Cloud Summit Africa 2020.

“The global economy has been seriously demoralised by the COVID-19 pandemic. It will affect the GDP of every country,” said Thabit.

He highlighted that while different countries have dealt with the pandemic differently, there are three key areas where economies are going to be impacted.

  • Initial supply and demand shock – The initial impact of the pandemic saw massive effects on supply and demand for businesses.
  • Containment stage – Government-mandated restrictions reduce demand for products relative to pre-lockdown levels.
  • Recessionary pressure – COVID-19 will have a recessionary economic effect on the global economy.

“The big question that most, if not all businesses have, is how long each stage will last before economic activities go back to normal,” said Thabit.

As a result, businesses are uncertain about how they should adapt.

Post-pandemic life

Thabit highlighted that post-pandemic life will be very different to how it was before COVID-19 arrived.

He said it will affect both businesses and our personal lives, and it will be very important for businesses to adapt accordingly.

This includes dealing with:

  • Increased working from home
  • Less travel
  • More video meetings and OTT service usage
  • More online events
  • The need for business continuity on the cloud
  • Necessary cloud-based, broader resilience plans
  • Increased online content consumption

Thabit said that as businesses enter the post-pandemic world and need to deal with these and other new trends, the cloud is going to become core to their IT systems.

“For those already using cloud services, we see an increase in cloud consumption, as demand for increased work and services continues to grow,” he said.

“Other organisations may migrate from data centres to cloud to solve issues suffered as a result of the pandemic – such as difficulty in accessing their data and infrastructure, as well as delays in demand chain.”

Thabit said that leading public cloud providers offer more reliable options for business continuity, and the right cloud partner can help businesses overcome any transitional challenges.

“The right cloud partner is the one that has experience, can deliver, and can advise on how to optimise spend,” he said.

Thabit touted Huawei Cloud, which combines over 30 years of accumulated technology innovation and expertise to “offer customers everything as a service”.

He explained that future tech infrastructure for businesses can be seen in the context of an aeroplane – while the cloud is the runway, technologies like AI, IoT, and 5G function as the engines.

By offering a full-stack cloud solution, said Thabit, Huawei helps its customers to grow their enterprises with a stable and secure solution.

Now read: How much it costs to build and host a website in South Africa

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