The COVID-19 pandemic has put system resilience in the spotlight. Around the world, IT managers and IT managers have found the front line of war to keep their organizations operational in cases few would have planned.
This has been a complicated task for many corporations. In our pre-crisis Future Systems study, we found that only 10% of corporations had broken the resilience of systems and put the right technologies in position to achieve some immediate and effective resilience.
As a result, most companies will have reveled in a strong learning curve as they work to fill gaps in their resilience measures. But for IT managers and IT managers looking for opportunities, delight will also have painted a compelling picture of what the long-term might hold. COVID-19 has pressed the reset button for the resiliency construction methods of older systems, and IT groups that are making the right changes will now be able to achieve significant benefits for their businesses.
The cloud is a smart example. In addition to helping companies meet immediate challenges, generation is promising as a core component of trading systems that are much more flexible and better at dealing with sudden shocks.
Consider the volatility of the call, which has been one of the most difficult economic consequences of COVID-19 containment measures. With physical outlets closed and others locked in their homes, companies in sectors such as hospitality have noticed a call for the fall. By contrast, online services, which add e-commerce, food delivery and media transmission, have noticed an unprecedented increase in demand. Retailers such as Carrefour, for example, saw a 300% increase in the virtual commerce call, while Netflix saw 16 million new subscribers register in the first 3 months of the year.
The cloud allows companies to face the challenge of demanding volatility in a variety of ways. First, through the cloud, IT managers can seamlessly reconfigure traffic to maximize the capacity of critical programs when spikes in volume and computing power disrupt the ability to serve consumers and vendors.
Another option is for organizations to move low-priority programs to the cloud to lose valuable human resources and systems. This is a technique that many online stores use to manage peak calls for seasonal grocery shopping spikes. For example, a main store we work with has been able to take care of a large build-up of Black Friday sales by downloading traffic from the main e-commerce site to a cloud-based coupon app. The technique prevented the site from failing and took a step forward in the overall visitor experience.
For companies starting with this approach, the first step is to position the right equipment for strategic plans so they can visualize their existing cloud intake models and optimize usage. In addition, corporations can take advantage of automation for manual activities from network configurations, garage, and less critical computers.
The cloud can also help drive innovation. By using cloud-based sandboxes, enterprises can expand a minimum of viable products in as little as two or 3 days. The technique was used during the crisis through a wide variety of organizations to address an even greater diversity of challenges.
A hospital in Spain, for example, has been working with its generation spouse to temporarily expand a new virtual assistant to help manage the exponential accumulation of incoming calls during the crisis. Meanwhile, the Singapore government was able to temporarily launch a cellular app called TraceTogether to help tactile search efforts in the geographic region; this initiative would not be imaginable without the cloud.
Finally, the cloud allows IT managers to better align prices with orders through their pay-as-you-go model. Companies can also proactively reduce inconsistent expenditure by promoting their surplus capacity in the secondary market. Again, the starting point is to have a complete view of the cloud domain. An energy consumer used ours to get a built-in view of their cloud usage across multiple corporate entities and generation providers. The company temporarily discovered more than 91,000 objects in the cloud, adding 9,000 virtual machines and nearly $2.2 million in cloud expenses consistent with the month. Now, with the rapid visibility of your environment, you can start optimizing your fleet’s prices in the cloud.
Cloud-based systemic acceleration and optimization is one of six pillars we’ve known for effective business resilience, with elastic virtual workplace, hyper-automation, architectural functionality and engineering, service continuity, and cybersecurity. By leveraging those capabilities, leading IT professionals are turning the COVID-19 crisis into an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. This will allow your businesses to go stronger, more adaptable and exponentially faster.
Author Kishore Durg is Senior Managing Director, Head of Smart Cloud and Infrastructure, Business and Acquisitions at Accenture Technology. Read Accenture blogs here.