Publication: CNBC TV18

 

With globalization setting in, teams spread across the globe and technological advancement, the remote working culture has been gaining prominence across the globe. The benefits of employees working remotely has been on a steady rise. The globe has never caught sight of a crisis like the COVID-19. This has led to a massive shift in business and has coerced employers both in India and globally, to mandate their staff to work from home thus disrupting the business landscape and shifting the success of a business to the strength of its digital foundation.

The switch has also acted as a wake-up call for organizations failing to invest in digital business and long-term resilience. While smaller start-ups are swiftly finding workarounds, in some businesses, such as banking, financial services, or firms that deal with critical data, it might be almost impossible to make teams work remotely all of a sudden.

A global research firm Gartner, Inc. indicated in its study that said that poor technological infrastructures is the biggest barrier to effective remote working. In the face of a lockdown, data on-premises is stuck, the servers cannot be rebooted, staff cannot be retained within the premise to manage these servers, and business information is more prone to data security concerns.

Businesses that can shift data and information to technological and digital platforms will be the only ones to mitigate the impact of the outbreak and keep their companies running smoothly now, and over the long term and the answer to these technological barriers is cloud computing.

Connectivity and agility are paramount to success. Until a few years ago, key industries financial, healthcare, manufacturing, and tech companies were building their own data centers to accommodate business requirements. Today, those data centers are entering buy Vs. refresh scenarios, revealing it will be a huge cost to raise those facilities to current standards.

This has resulted in organizations now exiting their on-premise data centers and instead, opting for an outsource to data centers that offer great access, control, intelligent infrastructure and cloud services at a fraction of the price.

The cloud is located in a data center. The cloud and the data center is a place, which is highly secure and can be locked down on a specific level.

An organization investing in cloud can basically migrate all applications to the cloud and use them from any location at any time. Similarly, if applications are moved to a private cloud, which is technically colocation in a data center with machines from the organization or the data center, it can be assessed from any location as well, thus enabling ease of working at all times.

VPN systems on the public internet can be established to support mass logins and there is always an on-site professional to assist concerns that arise. Also, the data centers possess policies to maintain servers in phases like a lockdown with 10-15 people on-site.

In addition to this, moving data to cloud or data centers, enables businesses to benefit financially due to cost savings due to economies of scale. Thus, data centers offer a collaborative platform that allows companies to overcome barriers of remote working while maintaining seamless business continuity and optimum employee productivity.

Along with storage, cloud computing is already widely used for data backup, disaster recovery and archiving. With the pandemic affecting the world at large, a number of organizations on the cloud and those using the opportunity to quickly and effectively shift their processes to the cloud have benefitted from it.

With a surge in data and an increased requirement of faster response times, IT infrastructures need to be constantly improved and should be ready for business continuity. Not adapting to market demands and trends will basically result in businesses bottlenecking their success in the years to come.

Cloud computing is the refreshed approach and the much-required response that businesses should opt for to thrive in opportunities presented by globalization along with challenges characterized by political, economic, financial and social instabilities and accommodate growth and support business.