The cloud computing industry is set to get a strong boost, as companies across sectors are forced to work from home due to the restrictions triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The upsurge in the digital user base during the pandemic require more cloud computing power.
The cloud industry grew at a compound annual growth rate of 24% in the past three years according to the consulting firm Deloitte India. There has been a lot of latent demand for cloud services coming in due to the lockdown situation, which can be executed efficiently by data centres as they offer economies of scale. The Cloud technology witnessed an additional growth of 5-10% from the expected Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 30% due to the massive digital transition. Cloud has become essential for almost all sectors of the economy including e-commerce, banking, media streaming etc, who stores their vast amount of data on Cloud.
Demand for cloud services is increasing among both consumer customers and enterprises, largely driven by increasing dependency on collaborative tools for virtual schooling, group videoconferencing, entertainment and gaming. There has been an increase of more than 80% in the number of participants for bachelors, masters, and doctoral-level degree in Cloud Computing at IIT Roorkee.
Cloud services that offer the infrastructure for data storage have facilitated the continuity of industries and learning during the pandemic, were cloud powers the back end of various applications in smartphones and other smart devices for storing a large amount of data. Anything which was earlier done offline have either shut down or has moved online due to the sudden arrival of the COVID-19. Online learning and work from home have become the new normal and there is a rapid increase in the number of participants enrolling for our Cloud Computing courses.
Cloud service providers have managed the workloads well as of now, but challenges to connectivity in certain rural areas remain where there are constraints related to network bandwidths. Privacy and data security are major concerns as phishing attacks have gone up since users are accessing networks on their devices outside their organisational setups where they had secure firewalls. Enterprise-grade hyper-scalers are safe but not all consumer services have a similar level of security protocols, which could open up a window for cyberattacks. Cloud providers are offering VPN and virtual desktop solutions which have the same data and cybersecurity capabilities as they did in an on-premises setting to overcome such challenges.
