The COVID-19 pandemic and the steps taken by governments to combat the disease have rapidly changed the way businesses can operate—presenting a fresh set of challenges and exacerbating existing pressures.
The long-term impact of the pandemic is not yet clear, but many economists expect that it will be unprecedented. For instance, Goldman Sachs predicts that advanced economies could contract by up to 35 percent as a result of lockdown and the social distancing measures triggered by the outbreak.
To continue to thrive in a volatile and fast-changing market, businesses are re-evaluating their business models. Ensuring that mission-critical IT infrastructure is cost-effective, reliable, and flexible is a top priority to enable businesses to pivot, transform, and align themselves with a post-COVID “new normal”.
Fluctuating Demand
Companies in different sectors are experiencing different challenges. For example, media, telecommunications, and streaming service providers are seeing a huge surge in consumer demand—placing additional pressure on their core IT systems.
To address this, companies in these sectors are looking to scale up their IT systems quickly. However, doing so requires a careful balancing act: invest in too much additional infrastructure and you could be left with redundant capacity that is expensive to maintain once consumer behaviour returns to normal.
In contrast, organisations in retail hospitality and food services are facing more complex challenges. Many companies in these sectors are seeing dramatic reduction in demand, and some are simply unable to operate as they normally would. For these businesses, finding ways to scale down their existing infrastructure or quickly develop new capabilities such as e-commerce solutions are some of the most pressing challenges.
New Way of Working
As well as witnessing sudden changes in consumer behaviour and demand, more business find that they need to enable their employees to work from home as much as possible in order to continue operating.
Setting up robust, reliable and secure remote working capabilities can be a real challenge, especially when the underlying IT infrastructure has not been architected to support this new way of working. Even companies with established home working capabilities are finding that having higher numbers of employees working remotely is putting new strain on their systems—slowing performance and reducing productivity.
Power of the Cloud
Whether you’re facing sudden changes in customer demand or need to develop remote working capabilities, cloud computing technology can help. The flexibility, scalability and variable pricing model of cloud makes it much simpler to ramp up or spin down systems as demand fluctuates, and makes both temporary and permanent changes to your infrastructure much easier to implement.
We’ve developed the Meridian Power Cloud—an extensive private cloud for hosting IBM AIX, IBM i and Linux servers on the IBM Power Systems platform. With flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing, we can help you quickly scale your core infrastructure with best of breed IBM technology—helping you reduce total cost of ownership and avoid unnecessary investment. We offer a full spectrum of options, from migrating and managing your entire core application landscape to moving parts of your infrastructure into a hybrid cloud solution. As an IBM Platinum Business Partner, we’ve got the expertise and experience you need to adapt and evolve your architecture to meet today’s challenging business environment—and plan for tomorrow’s new normal.
If you have any questions, the experts at Meridian are here to help. For more information contact our experts by phone at +1 (888) 684-3644 or send an email to sales@themeridian.com for more details.