The world has changed significantly in the four months following the first COVID-19 cases reported in Wuhan, China. Nations have closed their borders. Trade volumes have precipitously dropped, and workers across the world are furloughed or under lockdown. And, these are just the lucky ones. Simply put, businesses are being disrupted at an unprecedented scale. As this pandemic tightens its grip on the socio-economic framework of our global society, there is no telling what the future really holds, or how globally-networked enterprises will endure this uncertainty.
Perhaps the most prominent business impact so far has been the immediate need for rapid digital transformation. With the workforce learning to work remotely, enterprises face an uphill struggle to ensure sustained productivity and unfaltering customer experiences. As a result, organizations have had to reposition their stance almost overnight and adopt proactive digital strategies that can empower them to weather the on-going storm.
Cloud-Based IT: Boosting Digital Transformation in a Pandemic-Stricken Ecosystem
The challenges and roadblocks posed by the COVID-19 outbreak align strongly with the inherent benefits offered by cloud services. It’s as if the cloud was invented for just this scenario – as a potent weapon in this critical battle. A cloud-centric, cloud-first and cloud-native approach to IT is inherently the most stable, secure, flexible, and scalable strategy. Organizations are rapidly beginning to realize this reality.
Microsoft reported a 775% spike in the usage of its cloud services, primarily in areas most affected by the pandemic. Meanwhile at HCLTech, our Cloud-Native Labs are busier than ever responding rapidly to the growing need for enterprise productivity and addressing customer needs.
For businesses across sectors, this is an opportunity to fast-track their digital maturity. While addressing business continuity remains the primary concern, a COVID-19 specific approach to reimagining the entire digital ecosystem risks being counterproductive and a dire financial fallacy. Instead, businesses need to implement a cloud-based strategy that not only helps them counter the adversities inherent to a pandemic-stricken value chain, but also helps establish themselves as pioneers of digital innovation in a post-COVID-19 world.
Building a Resilient Present for a Stronger Tomorrow: COVID-19 and Beyond
At HCLTech we understand what businesses need to implement a strong cloud transformational journey. Be it developing strategies to endure a global crisis or preparing for a future-driven by digital excellence - our focus remains solely on helping organizations design, build, and enable a cloud-native enterprise. This is precisely why the HCLTech Cloud-Native Labs were established – to help enterprises stay resilient whilst gaining speed and agility within a largely uncertain, volatile business ecosystem.
The entire Labs’ environment is designed as a flexible assembly of hybrid, multi-cloud resources that are dynamically reconfigurable to suit the needs of any business without the need for physical human intervention. As a result, the Labs remain immune to the effects of COVID-19 as we continue to help clients accelerate their cloud-native transformation through uninterrupted services. All our Labs are currently running at full capacity with no staff physically present in the buildings. And the production-grade hybrid, multi-cloud environments enable enterprises to engage our services, irrespective of their specific vendor or technology preferences.
HCLTech’s Labs are comprised of an extensive array of on-premises computing environments partnered with a complete range of public cloud services providers. This provides enterprises with the option to move processing to wherever it is most required. And with client project environments working identically in all three of our on-premises compute environments in London, Dallas, and Noida, as well as in public cloud, businesses can automatically move workloads to their preferred location. Moreover, the secure remote connectivity to our global Labs’ physical locations allows for a seamless and painless switch between on-site and remote admin.
Moreover, the team of developers, architects, and operations staff at the HCLTech Cloud-Native Labs are equipped to work from remote locations. This allows our teams, just like our clients and their customers, to work safely from home. Eliminating the need for Labs teams to be physically present at fixed office locations allows projects to continue without interruption while ensuring uncompromised productivity. Being fully run on remote SaaS services makes the Labs business available to the global team from any location. As a result, enterprises receive service and support, unhindered by the magnitude of COVID-19 effects in any given region. It has been quite enlightening to see how enterprises have enthusiastically made the switch to remote collaboration to drive growth through uncertainty, and successfully achieved digital transformation.
Seeing it Through: The HCLTech Cloud Native Labs Promise
These truly are testing times. It is during times like these that partnerships need to go the extra mile and ensure a thorough digital journey with hands-on engineering and a focus on rapid impact. This is why our Labs team is working with enterprises at every step of the cloud enabling journey. This intimate collaboration allows for:
- Strategizing and direction: Design, validate and enable a transformational cloud-native journey.
- Showcasing art-of-the-possible: Help an enterprise experience the most appropriate approaches, vendors, and technologies to achieve their objectives.
- Adoption and enablement: Hands-on support to enable the creation of new cloud-native services and solutions, and guide the modernization of existing applications - all delivered using modern software engineering practices in a fully equipped Labs environment.
- Cultural transformation: Complete training and enablement programs to transform the entire workforce, making the shift to cloud-native behaviors a permanent one.
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented businesses with the truest test of resilience and determination in the history of the digital age. The steps that businesses take now will define what the future of work and the fate of their businesses will become. During this process of digital transformation, HCLTech is committed to enabling a future where business needs never get caught unaware in the face of any unfathomable global emergency.
To know more about HCLTech Cloud-Native Labs, please write to us at CloudNativeServices@hcl.com
