Zoom In: 'We've seen an uptick in businesses wanting to leave their datacentres,' says Cloudreach

Chris Bunch says that companies have opened their eyes to the risks of not being able to access on-prem infrastructure

The number of businesses wanting to leave their datacentres and adopt a public cloud approach has increased amid the COVID-19 crisis, according to Cloudreach's Chris Bunch.

Bunch, who heads up the firm's global Amazon Web Services business, said that many companies are faced with the challenge of not being able to get people out to maintain their on-prem infrastructures.

"There's been an uptick in people wanting to exit datacentres; people that really no longer can logistically operate their environment," he said.

"If you can't get people to a datacentre to deal with a hardware failure then it's a huge risk, so those conversations are around accelerating datacentre exits and a quick move to managed services.

"If you ignore all the other lovely benefits… removing that legacy risk of having critical systems running in environments you can't access or control, it starts to make people think."

Bunch, speaking to CRN from the Maldives, said that there have been "firm breaks" put in large cloud projects in industries that have been hit particularly hard by lockdown, including hospitality, travel and entertainment.

But he said that this has been balanced out by a surge in demand in other areas, for example financial services and the public sector. He explained that the growth is coming in areas where entities are having to continue serving the public, but in new ways.

He picked out cloud-based contact centre tech as seeing particular acceleration in adoption, with businesses seeing a huge increase in the customer queries over the phone and online.