As the battle against COVID-19 continues, Philippine businesses still struggle against double-digit GDP contractions. While restrictions are slowly being lifted to stimulate economic activity, the pandemic has made clear who its first casualties are – on-premise businesses.

“Today, businesses that are on the cloud, regardless of size, remained agile despite the drastic changes the pandemic brought,” said Jonathan Que, country manager of eCloudvalley, recently awarded as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Consulting Partner of the Year. “In the meantime, some of the biggest companies that have huge investments in on-premise or traditional setups are still struggling with scaling down their businesses, as well as downtime that leads to customer complaints.”

With thousands of customers across the region and with every employee being AWS cloud-certified, eCloudvalley is an AWS premier consulting partner, the top tier recognizing partners with the highest level of competencies and a higher number of customer references. A big part of their success stems from eCloudvalley’s strategy of working backward from the customer. By understanding the customer and identifying their business’ pain points, they are able to more effectively find solutions to help customers in their journey to the cloud.

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“On the surface, companies’ biggest challenges revolve around not being able to work in their offices and being able to keep their operations up 24/7 outside of that office,” Que said. “But there are three underlying problems that the pandemic has exacerbated for Philippine companies — overhead costs, availability, and scalability. All these can be addressed if businesses can operate in the cloud.”

Scalability

The biggest advantage that cloud technology can offer during the pandemic is scalability. As businesses slow down, businesses can also scale down their usage of cloud technology only to what is needed, inevitably bringing down their costs to keep their operations running. However, for those running a traditional setup, they’ve already invested in technology that is most likely underutilized in this pandemic situation, tying up what could have been potential cash flow into capital expenditure.

Following the trends of eCloudvalley’s customers over the three years the company has been operating in the Philippines, Que revealed that the biggest barrier to adopting cloud technology is an openness to change.

“Many businesses in the Philippines are still running traditionally and the transition to the cloud is seen as a drastic change they need to adopt emotionally and culturally,” he said. “This is understandable given the legacy of on-premise operations, but those who have migrated to the Cloud prior to the pandemic are faring better during this ordeal. And we’re not just talking about the large tech companies in the country – this is true even for innovative SMEs, which makes up 60% of our customer base.”

With the pandemic projected to continue until 2021, Que urges businesses to start considering their transition to Cloud to survive even post-pandemic.

“At this point, every customer interaction is crucial. Many businesses are struggling to remain accessible and available to customers, but those that are on the Cloud have too many advantages over those with a traditional setup. If a customer doesn’t get what they want from the business, they will easily move on to those who can keep up with their needs,” said Que.