Hybrid Cloud: A Lifeline for Businesses During COVID-19 Pandemic

Necessity is not only the mother of invention but also the father of progress. While making great strides in the medical field during this pandemic, the world of business is also rapidly adapting. The sudden surge in work-from-home employees, teleconferencing, and even entertainment streaming is testing servers’ capacities worldwide.

Giants like Netflix and Cisco Webex are scrambling to ensure their scalability is up to the task of connecting a tidal wave of users to their services. But it’s not just the Goliaths of the industry that are realising the importance of scalability. The Davids of Ecommerce are looking for solutions to help them endure—and thrive—during this unexpected shift of the traditional business dynamic.

Thankfully, the solution is already available. The Hybrid Cloud has already been developed as the leading infrastructure for prompting a Digital Transformation. COVID-19 has simply shifted that transformation into overdrive.

In this article, we will explain how the Hybrid Cloud is serving as a lifeline for businesses and as the foundation for a Digital Transformation that will catapult businesses, big and small, into the future of information technology.

What is Hybrid Cloud?

Hybrid Cloud is an IT structure that is a mix of private and public clouds, and sometimes on-premises data systems. It serves a variety of functions, including computing, storage, and services. The building blocks differ based on industry, and also on an individual business level. Thus, it’s difficult to define in less-broad terms. Though its definition is flexible, its backbone is this: the ability to adapt and expand quickly as a business evolves.

Keep Up with Client Demand

Before the coronavirus raised the bar on what qualifies as a ‘demand surge,’ Black Friday was used as the prime example. Black Friday shopping has quickly progressed from lining up outside stores to lining up internet search tabs for e-shopping. Not to mention, Black Friday has become a misnomer as it has expanded over the weekend and spills over into Cyber Monday.

The lack of scalability has ruined Christmas for some businesses, but the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to ruin businesses entirely. Hybrid stores that rely on in-person and online sales are frantically shifting their efforts to their online stores. Many brick and mortar stores have been cut off entirely from their customer base, and are either hoping to survive hibernation or are finally launching into the Cloud.

Regardless of how grounded a business was pre-coronavirus, the Hybrid Cloud is offering a safe place to land in the throes of surging customer demand.

DevOps: A Coordinated Strategy

The Hybrid Cloud is a product of DevOps, so it’s important to clarify how they are linked. DevOps is a management strategy that focuses on development and operations, and where the two overlap. Like the Hybrid Cloud, DevOps emphasizes big-picture thinking and synchronicity.

The goal of DevOps is to enable businesses to efficiently update software for their customers, clients, and within internal systems while maximising quality production. Again, it’s about adapting quickly to predictable influxes, such as organic business growth and Black Friday, as well as unpredictable influxes, like COVID-19.

Kickstarting a Digital Transformation

The silver lining of the COVID-19 outbreak is businesses being forced to reconsider their traditional methods. The pandemic has exposed vulnerabilities in business technology and processes that have laid latent for too long. Companies lacking a DevOps methodology are finding it hard to continuously adapt when their systems are separated. Lack of coordination and the speed of implementation between central IT and business units is now plain for the eye to see.

Reconsiderations of work-from-home policies, automating, and prioritising will inevitably spark changes that become the new norm. Remote work, education, health, and even entertainment and corporate events will become more widely accepted. The digital transformation that IT specialists had seen on the horizon is now at our doorstep. And, the Hybrid Cloud is the proverbial threshold businesses should cross to enter the next digital era. It is an available and viable option for the companies that traditionally didn’t require huge amounts of scalability but now do.

The Time is Now

With the first stay-home and social distancing orders, many companies felt ill-prepared for the consequences. They didn’t have the foundation or infrastructure to adapt to the situation. But it’s not too late. In fact, the time is now. It is possible to merge some of your existing systems, as well as expand, redirect, or even start from scratch.

The idea of a digital transformation may seem daunting, but it’s what we live for and have literally trained for. At Prolifics, we help organisations unlock the value of data through APIs, integration, enterprise DevOps, and Cloud-Native development. Put simply: we help your business run faster, innovate faster, and grow faster. We ensure you have the digital infrastructure to survive—and thrive—regardless of what the world throws at you.

Contact Us today to see if we can help kickstart your digital transformation.