COVID-19 and Remote Work – The Catalyst to Transform IT & Fully Embrace the Cloud

I’ve been hearing interesting perspectives on how COVID-19 is making some ongoing challenges even more relevant in recent days. Customers have been telling me about IT departments struggling to keep up with the infrastructure demands of having their entire workforce working remotely. I’ve even talked to people at Fortune 500 companies who are being asked to stagger the hours when employees work so they don’t overload their networks, VPNs and IT staff. Just this morning I spoke to a colleague at a Fortune 50 financial institution that informed their staff “they should consider the current remote work arrangement as not temporary, but business as usual for the foreseeable future, at least through the end of April”. We are all adapting to this mode of engagement, communication, work, etc.; yet one thing that will struggle to adapt is the traditional infrastructure and strategy around supporting distributed work forces.

Frankly though, I’m not hearing this from the subset of organizations that have moved to IT services in the cloud. They can adapt quickly because the cloud offers flexibility and economies of scale, both in resources and knowledge. Leveraging a dynamic ecosystem means that they can adapt quickly to uncertainty or new conditions.

It’s clear that the cloud can be a game changer for enterprise IT. I believe modern companies should expect this same agility in the ways they store, access and analyze their data—but I also know it’s usually not as easy as moving everything to a public cloud late on a Saturday night.

That’s why we’ve invested so heavily over the last few years in AtScale’s Intelligent Data Virtualization platform — enabling organizations to integrate data from wherever it makes most sense. This means the flexibility to use legacy systems while they transition to the cloud, or even blending data from multiple public and private systems with different governance, performance or security requirements.

In every crisis, there’s an opportunity—if you’re aware enough to see it. AtScale can help you apply the lessons we’re learning to all your data and business intelligence needs. If Plato was right and, “necessity is the mother of invention,” then AtScale is the father of bringing OLAP workloads non-disruptively to any cloud, while providing optimized cloud performance and support of both hybrid and multi-cloud environments.