Faced with the epidemic of the Coronavirus (Covid-19), the IT industry is in total solidarity with businesses and their employees, and will continue to mobilized business as much as it can in the days and weeks to come. However, the burden that this sector is currently bearing cannot be ignored. The coronavirus outbreak is a human tragedy of its own kind, that has by far affected millions of people all across the globe. Along with people, it is also having a growing impact on the global economy and business infrastructure. And, it won’t be unfair to say that, even if the coronavirus will not infect you personally, it irreversibly leaves its mark on your daily life – due in particular to the current precautionary measures (lockdown and curfews) that the running bodies are performing to prevent human population. But we must not forget the fact that if we won’t bear its impact physically, we should be ready to face it financially.
More than three months after entering the scene, COVID-19 continues to shake up plans and savings of the entire business world and the IT industry is no exception. But along with this crisis that all businesses have to deal with; the IT sector and its infrastructure has to meet an additional burden of efficiently mobilizing the remote cloud work options simultaneously.
At present, every industry and business is piled up with countless cancellations, postponements and absences noticed during major events. To cope up the situation, the first and the foremost options chosen by businesses is to shift their work operation to digital or online medium as much as they can. Businesses with bricks & mortar business models are temporarily closed and to meet up the loss they are increasingly looking for online options, while others asking their employees to work from home; so that the optimal productivity, commitment, engagement and profitability of the business can be maintained.
As soon as the Coronavirus outbreak is hitting the countries, the first and the foremost preventive measure their governments undertake is imposing the lockdown or curfew across the territories to foster social distancing amid population. At the same time, this situation calls businesses to hop for remote work options as much and as quick as they can. This has brought the resilience of IT infrastructures under testing, as they are predominantly geared towards in-house or on-premise work settings. As more and more people are opting for work-for-home options businesses are looking towards cloud infrastructure with the hopeful eyes. Now, it’s the high-time, when the resilience of cloud infrastructure will be soon challenged. Although it is not a matter of minutes or days. Migration to cloud is a whole ball game which has a designated protocol of installations and deployment that needs to be followed. It is also noteworthy to mention that the experts are still skeptical about the fact that the IT infrastructure would be sufficient to cope up with this additional burden.
Economy experts are predicting that the pipeline IT projects would be expectedly shelved until at least 2021. The reasons are obvious. Business organization are not investing in any new project for temporarily, as they want to save funds for the difficult times, while waiting for the situation to be stabilized. This also means that the software vendors are going to have a tough year ahead with very little new business coming in by the end of last quarter.
As majority of the IT projects are on the verge of being shelved soon, IT suppliers have started complaining about the short-term but sharp decline in the demand of notebooks, displays, wireless LANs, headsets, VPNs etc. On contrary, collaboration clouds are buckling up to meet the increasing demand under the weight of remote workforce that is progressively to online work options.
Hopefully, this pandemic situation will be over soon, and we all will be back at work. The first thing that IT department will need is to review the performance of their cloud performance, to know about their capabilities, strength and abilities to cope up the crisis situations. Additionally, they will be required to adjust their strategies and resources accordingly.
With the increasing trend of more and more people joining the remote workforce, the demand for collaborative frameworks and application is also increasing. Business organizations that have already integrated collaborative frameworks such as Microsoft Team and SharePoint Online with their enterprise system are in great relief in this situation. If you are among the business that have not adopted any online collaborative platforms, then give Code Creators Inc. a try now. CCI is well-recognized within the community for its affordable, tailored and high-performing software and business applications. Click here to connect now.
Last week, IBM put around 1250 people at the risk of redundancy that were working for its Global Technology Service Organization in United Kingdom, just to cut at its divisional overheads. With the increasing crisis, more and more IT firm are considering severance of its divisional staff to reduce their expenses. On contrary, remote and freelance workers are getting more work offers these days.
Nobody knows when this pandemic is going to be stop, but one thing is for sure, the damage will be long-lasting.