It is not surprising that both digital transformation and cloud take-up will both get a boost from the current pandemic. We said as much in the first week of lockdown, and now the statistics and surveys are coming in to support the assumption.
The cloud market had reached a tipping point when the pandemic started. The reluctance to use the cloud seemed to be evaporating as security concerns and other barriers disappeared.
In one survey, the vast majority of businesses have changed their IT priorities ‘incrementally, significantly, or dramatically’ since the start of the crisis.
The main reason is that many were simply unprepared, and they simply do not want to be in this position again.
Across the board and across the surveys, it is emerging that remote working and all that it means will continue after the pandemic is under control. 98% of respondents from a study by Global Data, commissioned by Telstra, believe that video meetings will continue as part of the much talked about ‘new normal’. 93% says that they are accelerating their cloud deployments, to support this trend.
Add cloud infrastructure to 5G, and it comes as no surprise that China is leading the way. The cloud infrastructure services market in China, for instance, grew by over 67% in the first quarter of the year, when compared to the same period in 2019.
News comes through on an almost daily basis of breakthroughs that could open up real, practical 5G applications.
As we reported earlier this month, several Chinese partners are working on ‘promoting the construction of new information and communication infrastructure in the healthcare sector while facilitating the development of the telemedicine industry, to create a new era of 5G smart healthcare’.
Automation will increase to support the trend too, driven by more remote working and, according to the Telstra report, ‘automation for provisioning and service management will likely increase too’.
If there was a lingering reluctance to adopt cloud in some form or other (multi-sourcing of cloud providers seems to be the most popular strategy), then that has well and truly disappeared.
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