How the public cloud can be your Rx for emergencies like Coronavirus COVID-19

How is coronavirus COVID-19 connected to online and the cloud?  Put simply, the logical response to this will push society to rapidly change how it interacts – moving from societal to non-interactive, from in-person to online.  This means EVERYTHING that already occurs online – shopping, social discourse, etc. - will rapidly accelerate, and many interactions which occur in-person will look to move to online. 

This might be easier said than done.  For example, retail is likely the most impacted in the near-term.  How will a retailer respond if their online business suddenly increases three-fold in a week?  The simple answer would be public cloud, as it is designed to provide massive scalability, but with every increase in online traffic comes with an increase in online threats.  ANY online property needs to bolster its security now before they encounter such problems.  If there is any kind of unreasonable panic, it will be difficult – if not impossible – to marshal such resources then.

COVID-19 has companies scrambling to get their workers into a safe and secure work-from-home environment. Companies that have been planning for distributed workloads and remote workers are already aware of some of the challenges.  Companies that are new to this scenario may not know where to start.

In addition, many organizations are considering how much of their traditional business can be shifted to online – and how quickly.  Again, without necessary security, this will be a prescription for even worse issues.  Companies already working with the public cloud know that security in the cloud is significantly different than security on-premises.  Many traditional workloads can’t be securely migrated without some measure of refactoring or adaptation.  Many native services have limits on the number of secure remote users they will support in a given instance.  There are a lot of variables.

This is why companies often consider third parties who have experience in a hybrid world and can mitigate that need for significant adaptation.  I explored how cloud security differs in depth in the following articles:

• Five Pillars for well-architected AWS security


• Five pillars to actionable Azure cloud security


• Five Ways Cloud Security Guardian enhances security in the public cloud

We hope that COVID-19 recedes as quickly as it appeared, but for now, it’s a good idea to prepare your business for a potentially dramatic increase to anything you do online, and a much stronger focus on public cloud to support this increase.

And like all Barracuda solutions, there are free trials and deployments directly from cloud marketplaces and a broad base of consulting partners to help in the process of getting you to the cloud. For more information visit our website here.