The world is desperately trying to cope with the effects of Corona aka Covid-19 outbreak NF. As the virus achieves pandemic stage and number of affected people is touching thousands across the globe, the business world is bracing itself for a much more intense and prolonged impact than initially expected.
How is COVID-19 Disrupting Business?
By now, the effects of COVID-19 outbreak have spilled over to virtually all key business sectors. Granted that such crises do tend to create business opportunities for a select few niches but the overall impact on business entities and investor sentiment is devastating.
Also Read: Get dinCloud Hosted Virtual Desktop To Run Business Smoothly
The outbreak has wiped out trillions of dollars in market capitalization across global stock markets, triggering a selling frenzy across bonds, commodities and other financial assets. Nearly all global hubs of production have come to a screeching halt and businesses are desperately trying to maintain minimum functionality.
Achieving Bottom Line Functionality
The Corona virus has disrupted production, logistics, supply chains and many other core functions of businesses across the globe. In the backdrop of this crisis, each business is rushing to establish and maintain minimum or bottom line functionality for its products or services.
Corona and Remote Work Scenarios
With the global medical and pharmaceutical world desperately trying to figure out the anatomy of this deadly virus, there is little that we know about this disease. So, the world has reacted to this outbreak by enforcing virtually a global scale lockdown or quarantine.
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Our only defense against Covid-19 so far is to stay confined within our homes, even for the most important needs. The only exception to this rule is life threatening needs such as food and medical supplies. What this means for businesses is that their employees will no longer be showing up at the workplace.
The biggest challenge that has emerged for businesses in the backdrop of COVID-19 is how to maintain minimal business operations remotely. With the exception of a handful of entities that have shifted fully to the cloud, the COVID-19 outbreak has caught most businesses off guard.
Surge in Teleconferencing Platforms
The first step in establishing some degree of online operations is converging all employees at a unified online platform for communication. Given the slow pace and hassle involved in emailing, organizations have started resorting to online teleconferencing and collaboration platforms.
Ever since the surge in cases of Corona in January of 2020, most such platforms have reported an exponential spike in their download and usage stats. Some key beneficiaries of this surge include Tencent Conference, WeChat Work, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Slack.
Also Read: Cloud Computing and Covid-19 – Bracing for Remote Work Scenarios
True Financial Impact of User Spike
Despite a nearly five fold surge in user base of the above online communication platforms, it would be premature to gauge the financial rewards of this recent uptick to these platforms. The major cause for concern is that most of these platforms offer base services free of charge.
It is only the premium versions of these platforms that are offered against a usage fee, actually translating into revenue for these companies. So, the percentage of these recently added users that actually goes on to subscribe for the paid versions of these platforms is a metric to watch very closely over the next few weeks.
Distant Learning Platforms
After online collaboration platforms, distant learning platforms are the second largest segment to benefit from the effects of COVID-19. Being a highly vulnerable segment of the society, students have been strictly advised to stay at home till this crisis subsides.
However, the education sector is so critical for the future of nations that educational institutions have rapidly started adopting distant learning platforms. While this was more of an option before the outbreak of Covid-19, it has now become a necessity for education institutions across the globe.
Cloud Solutions and Remote Work
Without prejudice to the importance of online teleconferencing or collaboration tools, it is the actual productivity of remote employees that will truly make a difference. Perhaps the best fit to serve this need is Cloud Computing. Using cloud powered Virtual Desktops, an entity can ensure a productive workforce.
Employees will log into their virtualized desktops from the comfort of their homes and execute organizational tasks, as they would on their systems available at the workplace. The internet would serve as the connecting medium between an employee and the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) that is providing the Virtual Machines.
For the majority of basic cloud computing needs, an organization can be up and running in the cloud in matter or hours or a couple days at the most, which is phenomenal lead time in the backdrop of a complete lock down. The other great aspect of the cloud is that full support is also available remotely.
At any stage of configuring or using the newly incorporated cloud solution, an employee can instantly avail the support of the CSP over a wide range of media such as telephone, email, Skype or video call. The other great aspect of cloud based solutions is their inherent flexibility.
With changes in the operational needs of an organization, the CSP can modify the cloud based service plan to add or remove features and applications. No changes to the organization’s hardware would be required, which is otherwise next to impossible due to enforced lock downs across all major cities.
dinCloud and Remote Work Solutions
Being a premier Cloud Service Provider (CSP) with a global data center footprint, dinCloud is a very potent CSP that can cater to most of your organization’s Work from Home needs. We offer Virtual Desktops, Virtual Database Management among the wide array of cloud based services.
Using dinCloud infrastructure, establish organizational operations remotely from the comfort and safety of employee’s homes. By leveraging the cloud, you can not only maintain critical operations and retain valuable customers, but also attract new potential customers by offering services at this testing juncture.
Conclusion
While we struggle and hope to devise an antidote for the COVID-19 pandemic, establishing and maintaining critical business operations is also a need of the hour. Just get in touch in with our technical team to help us understand your cloud computing needs and let dinCloud take care of the rest.
