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What the COVID-19 crisis taught us about the cloud and business continuity

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed life as we knew it, in many ways, forever. While its impact on our day-to-day lives has been huge, the impact has been even more severe from a business perspective. The social distancing norms, staggered operating hours so as to limit crowds, the masks, shields, barriers, and what-not! From the business continuity perspective, companies had to adapt themselves to the new normal fairly quickly.

One major change for businesses was the need to switch to the work-from-home model to keep things running smoothly. When countries all over the world started imposing lockdown restrictions, companies had no choice but to switch to remote operations if their line of business allowed them to do so. Earlier what was perceived as an advantage for employees (the permission to work from home) was now mandatory for survival of the business. Even businesses that allowed employees to operate from home before the pandemic had a tough time migrating their entire setup to the work-from-home model.

Here are 5 common challenges they faced from the IT perspective

Access to critical data and applications

For businesses that didn’t store their key data and applications in the cloud, this was a huge challenge. How do you ensure each of your employees have access to all the business data, programs and apps they need to operate efficiently? Companies that had already adopted the cloud as their core data storage means didn’t face this challenge as everything was accessible from anywhere, using any internet enabled device (laptops/PCs/tablets/smartphones, etc., )

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Cybersecurity concerns

With employees working from home, businesses’ fears of cybersecurity incidents were increased. Cybercriminals, on the other hand, knew full well all the security lacunae that existed in a hurried remote working environment setup and exploited them to the fullest. Industry reports showed that the initial few months of the pandemic saw an increase in cybercrime and related attacks on businesses.

Data loss

For businesses that didn’t operate in the cloud, data loss was another problem to look into. How do you ensure data backup and recovery when your staff is using their personal devices for work purposes? Also, how do you ensure they are taking all the precautions necessary to secure the data they are storing on their devices?

Hardware issues

Some businesses provided their employees with their work devices at home. For example, employees in some companies were allowed to take their office computers home for work use. But, that still didn’t solve the backup and recovery or cybersecurity challenges entirely, because management still lacked ways to maintain control over the devices.

Phones

With employees working from home, it was a challenge for many businesses to manage their phone numbers--especially for client facing employees. Businesses with VoIP phone systems could make this transition easily, whereas those still relying on the traditional phone setup (PBX) had to resort to cell phones and couldn’t use their business numbers for a while.

Key lesson: Move with the times, adopt new technologies, adapt to newer ways of working

The one thing this pandemic taught businesses is that it is important to move with the times and adopt and adapt to the latest technology. While you don’t have to be the first one in the market to invest in the newest technology, once its effectiveness and usefulness is proven, it does make sense to switch to it. For example, cloud technology offers solutions to almost all the challenges we discussed, and has been on the market for quite some time now. Here’s how the cloud allowed businesses to overcome the challenges posed by having to suddenly switch to the remote operations model.

Challenge-1: Access to critical data and applications

This issue is easily resolved by migrating to the cloud. The cloud offers unparalleled connectivity to your data—from anywhere and at any time, with any internet-enabled device.

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