During an unprecedented crisis that could easily have brought many businesses processes and productivity to a grinding halt, cloud computing has enabled firms to continue operating near seamlessly.
It seems now that no one is unaware of the growth of the likes of Zoom and Microsoft teams with consumers and business, and the reason that millions of people can use this technology is because of the benefits of using cloud computing.
The benefits of cloud computing can depend on the type of business, for example, for many businesses it will simply be the case of enabling remote working.
“The cloud has been absolutely essential and I really don’t know how we’d have coped without it. If we were still reliant on physical datacentres, we wouldn’t have been able to expand so quickly,” says Patrick Babic, service owner for the end-user computing team at energy giant Centrica.
Centrica had the capacity to expand their cloud service to blow so many employees to work from home, taking advantage of the benefit of being able to scale up and down as and when required in a short space of time.
Scaling up thanks to cloud adoption
The ability of cloud computing to scale-up is particularly of benefit to the e-commerce sector. Adam Taylor, co-founder and chief executive of PetShop.co.uk, says that as the company had shifted to a cloud strategy before COVID-19, it had been able to cope with unprecedented demand.
“We’ve been told by manufacturers, such as Mars and Nestlé, that we’ve been able to scale up more swiftly than most of our competitors and this has been because of cloud infrastructure,” says Taylor.
“We’ve gone from packing and shipping 1,000 orders a day to 4,000 orders a day. We were able to scale up to meet this demand within the space of two days.”
While some of their competitors had to shut down their websites due to the sheer volume of customers accessing online shopping during the lockdown, PetShop.co.uk’s website remained stable, and cloud computing meant the company could order the stock in quickly, pack it and dispatch it more swiftly, and log all this in accounts.
No contact in contact centres
The need for customer service departments has been vital during the lockdown, as consumers do not have a face-to-face contact option. To comply with social distancing measures, contact centres have switched to remote working, and cloud computing has been at the heart of enabling organisations to manage high demand.
Benefits of cloud computing cannot be ignored
Cloud Computing has allowed firms to allow access to vital information, from wherever it is needed, such as architectural practice Maber, which uses a cloud service to specify building products and allows multiple users to work on the same specification.
According to Maber, the company would have struggled to keep working during the pandemic without cloud computing. As a result, even management have realised the benefits of cloud computing.
The reality is the pandemic has highlighted the importance of cloud computing and, if business leaders had not been convinced of its benefits before, they are likely to be now.
If you need IT support services in Doncaster, contact our team today.
ADDRESS
