The COVID-19 pandemic sent hundreds of millions of students home worldwide. Work from home is now the only option for many. In this crisis, cloud companies suddenly are the backbone of a global virtual learning and collaboration experiment on a scale never previously experienced. While the Internet backbone has long been a lifeline and reached over half the world’s population in 2019, without scalable cloud services, the current disaster would be unimaginably worse.
Fortunately, cloud companies are weathering the pandemic stress-test caused by the sudden spike in workloads and waves of new, inexperienced users. Microsoft reports a 775% spike in cloud services demand from COVID-19.[1] The order of magnitude demand surge has led Microsoft to prioritize COVID-19-related workloads, and place tighter caps on its free cloud service offerings for new users, and admit that its 99.99% uptime availability target has not been maintained at all times and places through the outbreak. But while there have been incidents, there have been no major cloud outages attributable to the pandemic. Basically, for the cloud, COVID-19 is just a busy day at the virtual office. In fact, cloud…
