By Ashley Conway / Joseph Spurrier

Nearly every company was forced to shift overnight into reactionary mode due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Retail stores attempted to move to 100% online sales because their physical locations were forced to close. Schools pivoted to virtual classrooms. Businesses moved their entire workforce to a work-from-home model. Bold decisions were made to enable organizations to survive.

It’s worth noting, however, that the impact of the pandemic would have been far worse if it happened at any other time in history. Advancements in technology over the past decade, particularly the availability of cloud services, enabled businesses to more easily connect digitally and scale to meet the unexpected and unprecedented demand. For many organizations, 2020 was the year they rapidly accelerated their cloud adoption, launching new applications or migrating existing ones to the cloud to give customers and employees more reliable ways to access resources and avoid further impacts to revenue streams. Spend on cloud infrastructure services rose 37% to $29 billion during the first quarter of 2020.

It’s now March 2021 and we’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel (and we’re fairly confident the light isn’t an oncoming train). More than 365 days have passed since our lives were flipped upside down. New hiring methods have been implemented. Investments in new technology are seeing some payoff. Companies have a newfound confidence in their ability to work in a distributed fashion. Many of these accomplishments can be traced back to the acceleration of cloud adoption in response to the pandemic.

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