Introduction
This report explores Cloud computing technology and its impact on businesses in the context of the Covid-19 Pandemic. The analysis approaches how this technology supports business services to maintain operations while dealing with remote work and cloud migration while also exploring what encourages organisations to migrate from Infrastructure as a Service to Software as a Service. Additionally, from the perspective of migrating operations to the Cloud, what are the most common concerns and how they might impact organisations—finally, envisioning the post-covid era, this report scrutiny challenges and significant benefits for businesses embracing Cloud services and how they will perceive this technology to contribute to sustainable growth.
Table of content
1 – Cloud Computing technology supporting business services throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic.
4 – Envisioning the post-COVID era, how Cloud will provide a competitive edge for organisations?
1 – Cloud Computing technology supporting business services throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Since the global pandemic outbreak in early 2020, the appeal for online services scaled alongside the crisis due to numerous employees shifting to a work-from-home model to preserve their health while maintaining their organisations’ operations. While organisations struggle to align workforce productivity and health integrity, Cloud Computing arose as an unsung hero in the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Since then, this technology has played a vital role in enabling service providers to operate by providing enough resources parallel to a disruptive pandemic scenario (Alashhab et al., 2021).
Accordingly, Cloud computing benefits organisations in numerous ways. For example, providing easy-to-use Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) with outsourced hardware provides robust data storage and CPU power that allows the workforce to migrate from office to work-from-home model or enjoy the advantage of operating from anywhere. Additionally, Cloud Computing offers vital scalability and cost flexibility to facilitate organisations’ adherence and frictionless integration with APIs and accessing cutting-edge services (Kulkarni, 2012). Moreover, it spares organisations from investing in hardware, maintenance costs and data security issues by storing critical information in a more secure, optimised technological environment. Therefore, the Pandemic event has scaled Cloud Computing adoption while its workforce operates remotely and businesses rely on it to meet elevated digital-based customers and services demands (Alashhab et al., 2021).
Some of the most notable benefits of this technology are:
- Virtual data storage
- Security
- SaaS
- Cost flexibility
- Scalability
- Full-time availability
In contrast to its benefits, threats came alongside employees working from home because outdated personal devices started being used, exposing organisations to cyberattacks and data security concerns. Then, weaknesses emerge while managing to keep operations live because most organisations do not have the latest antivirus, operational systems, software and VPNs ready to go (Alashhab et al., 2021). However, Cloud Computing technology is currently evolving towards security enhancements to support businesses to operate safely. For example, recent experimentation approaches a new secure authentication and key agreement solution for cloud computing, while efficiency comes alongside cost reduction for its implementation (Bouchaala et al., 2022). Although this solution is still experimental, it demonstrates that Cloud Computing is a dynamic technology, currently evolving to benefit businesses while providing enhanced user experience. Furthermore, research indicates that lacking specific knowledge about Cloud Computing is a primary cause that prevents organisations from adopting this technology (Palos-Sanchez et al., 2017).
Cloud Computing has played a vital role in providing resources to organisations to optimise their performance since the beginning of the Pandemic. Moreover, its increasing adoption demonstrates that Cloud Computing will benefit businesses globally as a solid and promising technology in the long term.
2 – Evaluating the importance of businesses moving to the Cloud, highlighting the transition from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)?
Nowadays, organisations must embrace Cloud Computing to enable a competitive edge by providing scalability, full-time availability and reliability to deploy services regardless of a business or employees’ location. Additionally, having access to critical services, like IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, may supply specific business needs to enhance strategic capabilities. For example, the pay-as-you-go revenue model enables financial flexibility, vital for companies to operate cost-effectively, alongside scaling resources up and down to spare investment in hardware, software and maintenance. For example, IaaS offers data processing power, storage, enhanced security, capacity, and availability. Furthermore, all hardware is allocated remotely, equipped with the latest technologies – ready-to-go with full availability (Karim & Soomro, 2020).
- Meanwhile, while Cloud Computing scales globally, SaaS stands out. In contrast to IaaS, SaaS provides access to various services supporting organisations to innovate. For example, the adoption of SaaS by an HR organisation reduced the hiring process time frame from 12-day to one day. In addition, it allows the business to provide the best customer experience while significantly enhancing quality (IBM, 2020). Accordingly, these are the core characteristics attracting companies to migrate from IaaS to SaaS (IBM Cloud Team & IBM Cloud, 2020):
1. – Diminished time frame to pay off – As the application is already installed and configured in the server, SaaS spares organisations from installing and configuring the software locally to start benefitting from it.
2. – Reduce cost
a. Firstly, minimise maintenance costs relying on service providers.
b. Secondly, a multi-tenant environment dissolves numerous software licences and other expenses among multiple users.
c. Thirdly, scalability provides pay-per-use access to several services.
3. – Integration and Scalability – additional services are available by simply enabling it. Clients can scale services up and down, addressing real-time needs and avoiding hardware capacity costs.
4. – Up-to-date software and hardware maintenance rely upon the service provider while organisations optimise their services.
5. – A straightforward use supports proofs-of-concept and shortens the time frame for releasing new services.
In contrast to benefits, SaaS also implicates threats for a few reasons. Firstly, data security relies entirely on providers, which is critical. Secondly, availability – the vendor must provide consistent Load-Balancing-Feature (Kavitha & Damodharan, 2020) to avoid service disruption. Thirdly, price – the businesses are vulnerable to the vendor’s price strategy. Fourthly, the updates depend on the vendor’s criteria to decide when and what will change (Kulkarni, 2012). Therefore, SaaS is a strategic decision within this landscape because, in the worst-case scenario, it might negatively impact business performance. Nevertheless, SaaS leads organisations to higher profitability because it focuses on business strategies, optimisation and innovation rather than managing efforts towards hardware & licence expenses, maintenance and application updates (Karim & Soomro, 2020).
3 – Central businesses’ concerns when migrating data to the Cloud. Accordingly, it is a vital asset to organisations.
Nowadays, adhering to Cloud Computing technology is vital because businesses achieve a competitive edge by amplifying technology onto the organisation’s core. Meanwhile, operating in a Pandemic scenario encourages firms to speed up the digital transformation to prevail. Then, there is an expectation for cost flexibility and scalability while optimising resources: processing power, data storage, maintenance, security and availability (Mallidi et al., 2021). As a result, considering that critical data will be out of the business servers, choosing a solid vendor is vital, leading organisations to choose among the big providers: Google, AWS, IBM and Microsoft (Amin & Vadlamudi, 2021).
- Initially, the challenge is having a clear landscape about migrating to the Cloud. Accordingly, research (da Silva & Nascimento, 2020) demonstrates that before starting, it is critical to evaluate three aspects:
- Skilled team embracing the migration plan to carry out the process,
- Select a supplier whose Resources & Policies satisfy business needs
- The vendor’s IT Governance Maturity;
- Resources & Policies
Some concerns about the vendor’s features are tools & support while transferring data, application portability, and the necessary scrutiny of the vendor’s infrastructure and capacity. For example, vendor’s tool migration is vital to ensuring all data will be available, avoiding lacking privacy, integrity failures and cyberattacks while having appropriate customer support. Moreover, observing policies is equally relevant because it prevents vendor lock-in practices that may hinder future migration to another vendor (Amin & Vadlamudi, 2021).
Organisation downsizing
While the Cloud provides efficiency and optimisation, organisations do not need to keep high maintenance costs in the house because the Cloud provider does it. However, if the organisation dismisses engineers and additional staff, the organisation may lack these skills in support event planning. For example, lacking skills is risky when planning a migration or solving Cloud issues like analysing service capacity.
Security
Literature has shown that security is at the heart of the migration process and a central quality of any service provider. While vendor’s features, policies, and governance might offer challenges, a security breach is potentially devastating for business. Therefore, a solid reputation ensures that a reliable vendor fulfils all security requirements to host critical business data. In parallel, the IT team must have enough skills to deal with the security constraints of data transferring throughout the migration process, exemplifying: losing data, errors, privacy issues, integrity failures and errors, inappropriate formatting, low-performance, Cyberattacks, Unavailability, inadequate support, Non-compliance and Software Licensing (da Silva & Nascimento, 2020).
Hence, the migration to Cloud is a complex and challenging mission that implicates a long-term impact due to dealing with numerous vital aspects of the business, from moving critical data, information security, IT skills, strategy and costs. Therefore, finding the right vendor is strategic, along with policies and governance; the business must embrace solid continuity and disaster recovery plan (da Silva & Nascimento, 2020).
4 – Envisioning the post-COVID era, how Cloud will provide a competitive edge for organisations?
Nowadays, Cloud computing is a promising technology supporting organisations with a competitive edge in the post-Covid era. The Cloud will embrace more organisations while encouraging them to optimise processes and makes organisations more profitable and sustainable in the long term. However, in parallel to scaling its adoption, costs tend to decrease while overall quality and availability increase. Recently, Cloud has skyrocketed by supporting organisations in adapting to uncertain times by enabling access to other new technologies, SaaS by empowering organisations in evolving their business models and services, for example (Aggarwal, 2021):
1. Enhance business resilience with scalability, availability, flexibility and cost reduction in a more profitable operation;
2. Digitalising business operations by incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, Data Analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) Chatbots and others;
3. Incorporate Remote working – Cloud computing enables organisations to operate remotely or without an office while workers perform work-from-home.
A further legacy of the Pandemic alongside Cloud computing is the remote work adoption that demonstrates increasing productivity among professionals and is an attractive alternative for organisations to operate cost-effectively. At the same time, this operating model must observe work demand, organisational commitment and perceived productivity. However, effectiveness implicates stakeholders’ support and reinforced governance (Tanpipat et al., 2021).
On the other hand, Cloud computing will also implicate challenges to organisations because it will require enhanced information security policies and governance protocols to avoid privacy and operation issues. Furthermore, since a significant part of operations and critical data will transit through cloud-based services, businesses must be ready to deal with security threats by reinforcing and developing defence mechanisms (el Kafhali et al., 2022).
Accordingly, recent research lists the most significant threats addressing information security, operations and governance for organisations operating in a Cloud computing era as follows:
- Account or Service Traffic Hijacking
- Availability Chain
- Data Breaches
- Data Loss
- Denial of Service
- Incomplete Data Deletion
- Insecure Interfaces and APIs
- Lock-in
- Loss of Governance
- Malicious Insiders
- Shared Technology Vulnerabilities
Along with the development of Cloud computing, governance is critical because it will reinforce the best practices on data privacy and optimisation within work-from-home-practices to guarantee sustainable business optimisation while embracing the Cloud. (el Kafhali et al., 2022). Notwithstanding, it will somehow guarantee that all the Cloud computing ecosystem – from vendors, businesses and customers – feel confident in embracing enhanced services innovations with optimised processes and costs resulting from Cloud computing services (Peng, 2021).
Cloud computing will provide competitiveness in the post Pandemic era by facilitating digital strategies into organisations’ core while businesses enhance governance, security and procedures to enjoy the benefits of this new technology.
5 – How will organisations perceive the Cloud-based IT infrastructure to perform better and cheaper shortly?
John McCarthy described Cloud computing in 1961 as what it would become today, like a distributed computer network supporting organisations to distribute public services approaching the pay-per-use and capacity management concepts to facilitate operations while providing services (Stoica & Shenker, 2021). Although McCarthy was remarkably correct in envisioning it, he also adds the concept of simply transiting among vendors. However, nowadays, we are not there yet; major Cloud providers, like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, extensively offer proprietary software as their differentiation strategy to retain clients (Stoica & Shenker, 2021). In contrast, this is one central concern for businesses when selecting a vendor because it might implicate a lock-in conundrum. Meanwhile, management applications running under Kubernetes embrace the concept of “write once, run anywhere” to tackle this issue, envisioning a more friendly environment for business while opting for a vendor. As a result, a” Sky computing” concept will require numerous Cloud providers to provide frictionless data peering enabling accessible job transit throughout a vast and heterogeneous collection of standardised clouds (Stoica & Shenker, 2021).
Furthermore, organisations will continuously adopt Cloud computing as a vital business strategy. This technology will remain long-term because it is becoming a pre-requirement to thrive in the short term (Stoica & Shenker, 2021). In parallel, while increasing businesses moving to Cloud, costs drop because the multi-tenancy environment strategy shares costs to facilitate customer adherence. Also, organisations will invest in high-skilled cloud professionals to operate the technology while continuously building cloud-based strategies to move businesses towards innovation and growth.
Moreover, information security remains a primary requirement because organisations will rely on Cloud infrastructure to maintain their data under confidentiality, integrity and availability. Therefore, providers will have a mission of developing consistent infrastructure by acquiring top-notch hardware for integrity, enhanced CPU for availability and enhanced procedures to address privacy requirements (Alouffi et al., 2021). At the same time, while it might seem like an isolated item, security propellers significant development towards Cloud computing technology.
Overall, businesses shall perceive Cloud providers as solid enough to carry out their operational requirements, enabling scalability, process optimisation and cost-effectiveness. Moreover, organisations will scale by systematically requiring IaaS and SaaS to have frictionless access to cutting-edge technologies and operate cost-effectively while setting a competitive edge due to digital transformation. For example, while SaaS enables easy proof-of-concept for product development, it accelerates innovation, a critical success factor (Gevko et al., 2021). Finally, organisations will perceive their relationship with Cloud computing technology as an ongoing process that stimulates a mutual growth cycle between organisations and vendors, enabling sustainable growth alongside numerous industries overcoming the impact of Covid-19.
Conclusion
Despite Cloud computing being a leading new technology enabling organisations to optimise operations and provide meaning for innovation throughout the last decades, it has played a vital role in businesses’ success since the Pandemic. Since then, the workforce has performed work-from-home while maintaining operations live; however, it implicates security and performance challenges to maintain best practices and hi-performance teams. Meanwhile, migrating to the Cloud increased as a trend. However, it also challenges organisations to plan the migration and select a vendor that should support a strategic partnership enabling scale business performance in the long term; otherwise, vendors might offer risk. Nevertheless, it will benefit businesses in the post-Covid era because Cloud adoption will enhance business resilience, digitalise business operations and Incorporate Remote working as competitive advantages; in parallel, leveraging the awareness of data as a crucial business asset. Finally, Cloud computing technology evolves at a pace and must be embedded in the organisation’s strategy to optimise performance and cost, innovation and sustainable growth in the long term.
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