The Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent global lockdown have forced many businesses to shut down, but the number would have been even greater if it weren’t for cloud technology and digital transformation.
A report from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) claims two thirds of businesses sped up their digital transformation plans, mostly after seeing the effects of the new technology during the pandemic.
Polling 250 senior IT and business decision-makers, CIF found that almost all (91 percent) found cloud an important part in surviving the pandemic. For almost half (40 percent), the role of cloud has been described as “critical”.
Enabling the majority of the workforce to work from a remote environment was the cloud’s biggest advantage for most of the respondents (54 percent), but it’s far from being the only one. Greater organizational agility (44 percent) was also high on the list, as well as the ability to continue business as usual, despite the unusual time (42 percent). For a third of senior IT and business decision-makers, being able to scale easier was hugely beneficial.
CIF’s CEO, Alex Hilton, said businesses did a “commendable” job of adapting during such an unprecedented situation. “It is safe to say that many have been pleasantly surprised at how successful the shift to remote working has been,” he commented. “Benefits that might not have been so obvious beforehand have been recognized, giving many organizations a powerful platform to improve their long-term processes for the better.”
The fact that more businesses are now considering, or are in the middle of, their digital transformation journey, Hilton says “paints a fairly positive picture” of digital plans and preparedness, “although a fairly significant minority were caught off guard.”