Understanding How Cloud Is Helping Build Resilience In The Tested Times.

During the unprecedented times of coronavirus pandemic, the cloud has come through to support business while the world continues to fight against COVID-19. It provided much-needed resilience and agility to reorganize and prepare businesses for the upcoming challenges due to the pandemic crisis. As businesses start adjusting to a new normal over the next few months, leaders are wondering what this change may look like. In the past few months, companies were operated by work from home policies; resources were mobilized, enterprises moved to cloud to have safe, secure, and reliable access to the systems and data whenever they needed, wherever they were located. Now businesses must think for a resilience strategy to survive in the stressed market and foster recovery in the design of systems deployed.

By proving as a huge boon in lockdown, cloud allowed companies to continue their operation from remote locations, i.e., their houses. It prompted the desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) model that will enable employees with or without corporate laptops to access a cloud desktop from anywhere with an internet connection, through their devices. This also meant that the employers are free from worrying about issues like security, productivity, scalability, reliability of VPN connections and cost expenses (since most of the cloud vendors have pay for use schemes).

Business resilience refers to the capability of an enterprise to adapt and respond to internal or external dynamic changes, including opportunities, demands, disruptions, or threats. For a strong business resiliency plan, companies must invest in cloud architecture since it offers a secure, stable foundation empowering them to communicate and work remotely without any hassles. Also, it liberates the internal technical resources required to focus on implementation, monitoring, and support this environment. All these can have a positive impact on an enterprise's overall adaptability and recovery posture. If resiliency is not integrated into initial cloud adoption, organizations are accepting risks whether they realize it or not. The right decisions on the cloud are critical for organizations to reduce the overall spending and increase the ability to respond to cloud-related risks, threats, and opportunities.

According to IBM, the cost and effort of maintaining resiliency infrastructures force many organizations to go beyond traditional disaster recovery technologies and opt cloud resilience. Because of its competence for quick failover, a cloud solution ensures uninterrupted application and data availability irrespective of how geographically isolated the organization's systems, and users could be. It also brings unmatched scalability to business resilience and has the proficiency for quick delivery of new services.

In today's time, companies are constantly putting their best efforts to innovate, add new internal and customer-facing services into their existing cloud architecture. Hence the challenge becomes even more acute. They tend to focus more on identifying and migrating target workloads instead of emphasizing process and strategy. Further, the resilience strategy must encompass all the parts and junctures of critical business functions for the total engagement system. So, though the cloud presents an excellent opportunity to drive increasing value and differentiation from IT, the challenges of resilience and recovery must still be considered and addressed.