Enterprises get ready for new pandemics
The Covid 19 pandemic has forced businesses in Thailand and other countries in Asia Pacific to digitally transform on a fast track to survive its unprecedented impacts, according to senior executives of Nutanix, a US-based enterprise cloud computing firm.
According to Matt Young, Nutanix's senior vice president and head of Asia Pacific, what had happened in terms of digital transformation in the past six months of Covid 19 pandemic would have probably taken five years as enterprises quickly moved to ensure the new normal of business continuity amid second and/or third waves of the deadly pandemic.
Several countries such as Australia and New Zealand have faced the second waves of Covid 19 infections while Thai authorities are closely monitoring the potential second surge of domestic infections, prompting enterprises to be constantly alert and ensure that their business continuity plans are ready in the event of new waves of infections and lockdowns.
Over the past six months, most enterprises and their employees have resorted to remote working due to the first wave of pandemic and its subsequent lockdown as required by public health authorities. Many consumers have also turned to online shopping and home delivery of products as well as other remote services as provided by government authorities, healthcare and other establishments.
According to Jeff Smith, vice president of Systems Engineering - APJ, the firm has partnered with Microsoft, AWS and others to provide better hybrid cloud solutions to clients during the pandemic so that remote work, remote services and remote IT infrastructure crucial to the new normal of business continuity are well supported and secured.
The months-long pandemic has hit virtually all business sectors with travel, airline, and retail, for example, having to do more with less while healthcare, financial and government services, among others, turn to provide more remote services due to the requirement of social distancing.
In Thailand, work from home has become a new normal for many employees like in other countries with a trend heading towards a hybrid model of working from home on certain days alternate with going to office. However, enterprises still need to prepare for sudden spikes for remote working as well as remote services in the event of new waves of infections, pandemics or natural disasters such as flooding.
In other words, resilience is key in the new normal of business continuity and workers’ productivity as enterprises have modernized their IT infrastructure, upgrading from VPN to VDI and to Desktop as a service (Daas).
According to Jeff, the IT infrastructure for Daas to facilitate WFH (work from home) has to be flexible as more employees could be instantly required to work remotely or more customers would want more remote services due to new lockdowns. In such a scenario, the IT infrastructure has to support jumps in remote capacities, from 10 to 50 per cent or even 100 per cent within a short period of time if there were new waves of infections and lockdowns such as those in Australia and New Zealand.
In addition, remote learning is another big area of growth as schools and colleges reopen but still face pandemic risks so edge computing, IoT and 5G technologies will likely play a big role in delivering new remote learning services.
Over the past months, the demand for remote healthcare monitoring services, security, distribution, shipping and logistics, remote financial and government as well as other services have increased substantially, prompting enterprises to spend more budgets on new hybrid cloud solutions on a subscription basis as provided by Nutanix. These purchases usually cover a period of 6-12 months, rather than the previous traditional capital expenditure model for IT spending.
Meanwhile, Nutanix said it will work with Microsoft to deliver a hybrid solution with seamless application, data, and license mobility as well as unified management across on-premises and Azure environments, using Nutanix Clusters on Microsoft’s Azure.
“With this partnership with Microsoft and Nutanix show our commitment to delivering a true, unified hybrid and multicloud environment,” said Tarkan Maner, Chief Commercial Officer at Nutanix. “We know customers are looking for solutions to truly - and simply - advance their cloud journey. This partnership helps us deliver a single software stack across public and private clouds resulting in increased agility, streamlined operations, and significant cost savings.”
Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud and AI, at Microsoft Corporation said, “Many companies face complexities when managing hybrid cloud environments across private and public clouds. We are excited to collaborate with Nutanix to give customers flexibility and a seamless experience with hybrid Nutanix and Azure solutions.”
