M1Cloud provided a forecast of how the crisis will affect the business and what consequences will be for the cloud market. Alexey Danilyants, CEO of M1Cloud (Stack Group), presented the forecast.
The cloud business is successfully overcoming another economic crisis. This time it coincided with the pandemic, which became a kind of stress test for the entire economy and for each business individually. The cloud business was more prepared for the challenges of the current crisis.
From the point of view of remote work organization, the transition went quickly, since the infrastructure has been already created for many years. Using cloud computing power and cloud services for your own needs allowed to deploy all the necessary tools for working from home for several days, including VDI, services for online conferences, applications for sharing documents etc. Stack Group has also been using electronic document circulation for a long time, which makes it easier to work with partners and clients in isolation.
As for demand, there are a large number of new requests for IaaS from some current customers, as well as from companies of industries that are currently in growth – so the load on the existing infrastructure is beginning to increase. By the end of the year, it’s expected that the cloud market will grow by 25-30%.
New working conditions are pushing businesses to digitalize actively, although there were already "virtual" companies operating without an office, but now even the most archaic structures are forced to turn to information technologies to look for fast-deployed and reliable solutions.
Individual companies treat the new working conditions as an opportunity to test new models of work, to see the effectiveness and financial feasibility for future periods. On the other hand, employees who were previously able to work only one way, now have additional skills. People are adapting to the remote work and they will be able to use all the technologies more effectively to improve productivity.
The duration and scale of the impact of the crisis is difficult to assess but the business world will not be the same. However, the digitalization of the economy will continue even faster. Trust in IT and cloud services will also continue to grow, their functionality and reliability will expand, and the development model of any business will involve the use of technologies and cloud services.
Demand for clouds will be explosive and will continue for several years even after the pandemic. Thus, IT and the cloud, in particular, will become the support of the entire business so there is a need to prepare for this challenge now.
The problem of information security is not completely solved yet – the protected loop is violated in remote work, although some of the problems are solved by solutions as VDI (employees stay within the corporate network remotely) and secure VPN connections.
The second problem that the current crisis has revealed is the low computer literacy of non-technical personnel. This makes it more difficult to move people to remote work, because configuration is required not only on the server side, but also on the end-user side with their personal computers. In addition, often illiterate actions of employees lead to IS risks. There can be two solutions of this problem: employee training, including specialized courses and system administrators' services based on the rental model.
The third problem that businesses face is the Internet overload. Remote work immediately increased the load on the network that aren’t designed for such traffic. But telecom operators are already taking measures and the problem will be solved, although not immediately.
In conclusion, it can be said that there will be crises but the role of IT has changed forever, including clouds coming to the fore. Companies will again revise their business strategies – resources will be directed only to affect the main business processes.
