With Coronavirus, the demand for Zoom skyrocketed quickly.

In order to deal with this, Zoom had to hugely expand using public cloud providers like AWS & Azure (in addition to strengthening their own data centers).

Doing this literally saved the day.

BTW - this is the world's first test of utility elastic computing (provided by web-scale cloud providers) during a full scale global disaster. In this test, the public cloud has come out with flying colors as not only incredibly useful but invaluable.

Under any other kind of system, Zoom and other companies like it would have collapsed under the massive, rapid increase in demand. It would have taken them weeks if not months to buy extra server capacity and communications would have been interrupted globally.

This pandemic showed us in a way that nothing else can, the power of the Internet & Internet hosted elastic computing.

People always talk about big shifts in technology. This global crisis heralds the era of reliable, safe cloud based elastic computing everywhere.

From doctors and patients, students and teachers, relatives and loved ones to business people trying to get work done, everyone is now using public cloud computing not only to communicate with each other with apps like Zoom but to while away the hours of isolation with Netflix.

The disaster of 9/11 taught us the power & resiliency of the Internet. We learned that during disasters, the Internet got through when other systems failed.

The Coronavirus crisis is teaching us the power of the cloud and how cloud-based computing is critical infrastructure.

So, the next time you switch on Netflix or think about Zooming a work colleague or a relative in hospital, think about the folks running the invisible but critical public cloud infrastructure that makes all of this possible.

//FIN