How Should Cloud Migration Companies Support Customers Through Pandemics?

The coronavirus pandemic has left several organizations doubtful of their business continuity strategy. They feel it isn’t robust enough, especially when talking about cloud migration services. Organizations are often confronted with questions like: Is the public cloud scalable? Is there enough resiliency in the cloud to tackle unanticipated spikes in demand? Do public cloud providers have excess capacity to deploy new services faster?

IT leaders rely heavily on cloud migration consulting services to support a newly remote workforce, which is why cloud migration services need to be resilient and dependable. Cloud migration companies, thus, should reassure their customers of the adaptability and strength of their service offerings. Cloud providers with a redundant and robust architecture coupled with disaster recovery plans to respond to a pandemic are managing in the new normal quite successfully.

There are a few ways in which cloud migration companies can support their clients and deliver seamless services during times of crisis, like the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Stress Test Cloud Data Centers

At the time of any crisis, cloud migration consulting firms should demonstrate their readiness to handle spikes in demand and unanticipated disruptions. Not only do they have to manage increased traffic, but also maintain high service availability and performance while working with less staff or remotely. Cloud providers need to be prepared for the deficit in the supply of chips or servers, which is an outcome of supply chain disruptions facing manufacturing facilities during pandemics.

As a cloud migration company, you should develop comprehensive service continuity plans for increased usage, managing services in a remote fashion, and leveraging a geographically varied engineering workforce for support. The next step is to build customer confidence in your resiliency plans. You can do this by stress-testing networks and services, cloud data centers, and then releasing the results of these tests to your customers.

Handle Spikes to VPNs

We are witnessing a rise in remote work as well as an increase in the use of digital media and streaming services. All this creates challenges for cloud migration companies. There are unexpected surges in demand for which you need well-architected and well-run cloud services. Reports of inability to handle increased workloads and cloud slowdowns are cropping up every day. VPN capacity and traffic issues are the cause of these problems.

Cloud migration companies hosting VPN servers, internet services, and private network connections should help customers comprehend their limitations and expand them a cost that is measurable. They should also engineer networks to handle spikes, instead of simply throwing bandwidth at the problem, as doing so is costly.

Note that VPNs depend on server connections across private as well as internet networks. Any reduction in service quality appears to end users as slower loads and limited bandwidth availability.

Engage in Employee & Customer Philanthropy

There are cloud customers who have been facing revenue challenges during these abnormal times. Cloud migration consulting companies can behave like stopgaps, as they provide financial relief to customers, especially small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and technology startups. As a cloud provider, you can offer cloud-based collaboration and conferencing abilities at a discount for a limited period at least. Cisco Webex, Microsoft, Zoom, Google, and Slack are offering most of their capabilities for free to help organizations with remote workers.

Key Takeaways for Cloud Migration Companies

• Allocate additional networking bandwidth. This comprises of private and inter-data-center connections to help enhance available networking bandwidth for the consumers of cloud services.
• Form more partnerships with telecom providers to strengthen their telco cloud offerings. This consists of the use of high-bandwidth wireless technologies, like 5G, to support applications and workloads. These include remote patient monitoring and remote healthcare processes.
• Demonstrate the power of new technologies when people are looking for ways to create enriched digital experiences for meetups and collaboration.
• Segment and prioritize workloads, specifically those that produce significant amounts of networking traffic, to balance the urgent needs of stay-at-home workers with processes that can be implemented with a lower priority.
• Share cultural tips to offer a template for how remote work at large scale should be done.
• Collaborate with pharmaceutical companies and researchers to rapidly bring a cure to the market by speeding inventions, trials, and result-based research.
• Offer cloud-based collaboration and conferencing capabilities at a discount for a limited period at least, thus, aiding organizations with remote workers.

Is your cloud migration company supporting customers?

Companies offering cloud migration consulting services have a crucial role to play in the pandemic and the post-pandemic era. They need to make the task of migration to the cloud easy and seamless for their clients. As COVID-19 disrupts various elements of our professional and personal lives, there is a need to speed up the shift to digital. Public cloud services and managed service providers are inherent to this cause.