COVID-19 accelerates race to the cloud

It’s a well-known development that cloud-based products and services have become increasingly popular during 2020, as businesses have been forced to find ways to support remote workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A new report has now illustrated just how much more is being spent on services such as Slack and Zoom compared to traditional on-premises services.

According to data from Synergy Research Group for the second quarter of this year, spending on unified communications or collaboration tools increased by 7% from the second quarter of 2019, reaching over $12 billion.

“Most notably, spending on hosted and cloud solutions grew by 18% while spending on on-premise products declined by 18%,” the report said.

Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and chief analyst, said a steady migration away from on-premises products and towards cloud solutions had already been evident in the collaboration services market.

“COVID-19 and the sudden radical change in working practices has resulted in an acceleration of that transition,” he said.

“CIOs need to find ways of maintaining communications and productivity in a world where remote working is the new norm and offices are sparsely populated. This is a world for which hosted and cloud solutions are perfectly suited.”

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