THE PUBLIC SECTOR IS MASSIVELY GOING TO THE CLOUD, AND 10% OF BUSINESS HAVE SUSPENDED THEIR PROJECTS

The cloud operator  GigaCloud  summed up the results of the first half of 2022 and told how the cloud services market feels against the backdrop of the war with Ukrainian business and identified four cloud trends in 2022.  

“The full-scale Russian invasion marked the second turning point in the history of Ukrainian clouds,” GigaCloud said in a statement. — The first was in 2014/2015, when many large companies had to urgently migrate their services from the East of Ukraine. Then the cloud was the only way to quickly do what used to take months and years. Now, when you need to quickly migrate data and IT services to a safe territory, there is no other option than to use the cloud infrastructure. In the near future, business and the state will not build their own data centers, and the cloud will become the basis of the IT infrastructure.”

PRIVATE CLOUD

The first and most important trend is the private cloud. This is a cloud infrastructure built and provided for personal use by one customer. In terms of functionality, it is in no way inferior to its own data center, but it frees you from capital investments and hardware maintenance. In six months of 2022, the GigaCloud engineering team built private clouds for nine large companies. This is three times more than in the same period last year.  

THE CLOUD AS A TOOL FOR BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY

Business Continuity Planning is a combination of processes and tools that allow you to continue activities in the event of force majeure. When it comes to IT services, this means there should always be a fallback site that you can quickly switch to to continue working. In the clouds, you can store a current copy of the data, and the computing resources can be instantly increased if necessary. Since the beginning of the year, about 60% of GigaCloud customers have made or moved backup copies of their projects to the cloud operator’s western availability zones – Lviv and Warsaw. Thanks to data centers in the EU and Western Ukraine, as well as the presence of several sites in Kyiv, the operator’s specialists build cloud solutions without single points of failure, and customers create a reserved infrastructure, geographically dispersed. Since February 24, the operator’s sites in the west of the country have increased several times. Today, the Lviv site has more than 70 servers running 900 client virtual machines and storing more than 3.6 PB of data. The amount of RAM used in the infrastructure of the Lviv region during the war increased by almost 10 times (from 4 TB to 35 TB).

MASS MIGRATION OF THE PUBLIC SECTOR TO THE CLOUD

Before the war, the share of the public sector in the revenue of GigaCloud was more than 10%, and now it is 25%. Experts suggest that this area will grow rapidly in the coming years. This will also be facilitated by the law “On Cloud Services” signed by the President. The support of the big three – Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – played an important role in the issue of public sector migration to the cloud. At the beginning of the war, they provided free loans to Ukrainian state organizations to host IT services. Feeling the opportunities and benefits in the cloud, hundreds of government customers will no longer want to return to their own servers.  

“FREEZING” IT INFRASTRUCTURE

Studies show that the war has slowed down or suspended the work of 86% of Ukrainian companies. Someone stopped individual projects, someone was forced to completely close the business. GigaCloud customer churn has been 10% since the start of the war. Accounts receivable from customers increased by 4.2 times. 3.6% of customers could not pay their bills. GigaCloud “froze” the resources of such clients for free and stored them in the cloud for free for six months.  

“Despite the difficult first months of the war, the GigaCloud infrastructure is working properly, which allows tens of millions of Ukrainians to use the services and services of our clients every day. The team had to work many times more and faster, but we managed and continue to create clouds for the freedom of our customers, ”summed up in the cloud operator GigaCloud