Is COVID-19 a catalyst for hybrid-cloud adoption?

In the current testing times, internet traffic usage has soared, and organisations are scrambling to ensure that their business can continue to operate effectively. Early estimates show that internet traffic has increased 50-70% mainly due to a combination of working from home and increased video streaming.

Looking at these use cases individually, video streaming has risen more than 20% overall and up to 40% for daytime streaming (8am-5pm) globally during the COVID-19 lockdown. This increased usage, coupled with new online video services being rollout out (Disney +) have put a significant strain on providers who support these services.  Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure have all seen an increased number of outages as a result of COVID-19 usage and thus each of them has chosen to prioritise workloads and throttle non-critical services.

In the corporate environment, organisations have been hurriedly rolling out new services and enhancing existing ones to meet business demands while companies with limited or no work-from-home policies have had to rapidly rethink their working models. Full-time working from home has increased from around 5% of the UK workforce to around 60% with the strain starting to show on existing technology services.

Many companies have been implementing their carefully crafted business continuity plans only to realise that many of these models were based on short-term outages of 1-5 business days. As a result, they have had to prioritise resources for critical staff members, rollout many new physical laptops and virtual desktops, and accelerate the deployment of emerging collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams.  This is evident by the 100% increase in Microsoft Teams usage over the last 2 months.

Jokes aside, this really highlights how unprepared many organisations are for such a global outage and true collaborative working, but also highlights how quickly IT departments can respond when they really need to.

The global increase in technology usage has required IT departments to rapidly scale both their aging infrastructure and their cloud services. This has led to some cloud providers like Microsoft Azure ‘rationing’ their cloud capacity to focus on its online service (O365) and away from customers mission-critical workloads. Whilst this is happening, organisations who own their data centres or manage their technology in colocation facilities are trying to increase their compute and virtual desktop capacity quickly, leading to shortages in the availability of hardware infrastructure that is mostly provided by China – one of the areas most affected.

While implementing digital workplace services and moving to the cloud have been on many IT strategic roadmaps for the past 5 years, the adoption of these services has been slow. Changing an IT operating model to have a 50%+ bias towards the cloud and cloud services is a big change for most organisations and one that is coupled with a perceived high risk in migrating critical business services.