The Numbers Are In: Cloud Solutions are Driving and Accelerating Digitalization

What we, as a society, are experiencing today because of this pandemic is profoundly unique to our generation.

Not one single society has ever experienced such a vast global digital mobilization and workforce-related shift.

Not long ago, in times like these, economies were halted and most people were afraid to perform economical transactions because they had to rely on human interaction.

Now, the internet has opened a new world for everyone.

What SARS-COVID-19 does to our society will have a long-term impact on how we think and do business. And these changes might be permanent.

Despite the already known bad sides of the pandemic that we see in our day to day lives, there are some possible upsides that the media hasn’t had time to investigate.

With certain roles becoming redundant due to the disruption, it’s safe to say that more and more people will start looking for alternative revenue sources, including online businesses.

We saw a glimpse of this a couple of years ago when the shift to freelancing allowed a new generation of workers to generate new income for their household. But they relied on marketplaces that were already built.

Today, it might be possible to jump to a potential new paradigm, where there are online businesses that are created by individuals, and instead of hiring employees to perform specific actions, they hire other online businesses to fulfill a specific need.

Meanwhile, businesses that have previously relied on offline transactions are now faced with the need to move online, due to the lockdown.

We might be shifting from offline businesses and freelancing, to something… new?

But this is just the beginning and nobody can tell for sure how things will turn out.

You might call it, the acceleration of digitalization. Ehh, time will tell.

Being Cloud Experts and understanding what’s happening to a business’s online architecture, we want to present the following (+ a solution at the end).

What roles are managing the business’s cloud infrastructure?

The Research

We started with the United States, because that’s where most of the cloud providers are based.

We looked into LinkedIn’s data and tried to see what’s the status of the US market when it comes to cloud-based businesses.

We searched for all the people that had the Chief Technology Officer in their job title.

We cross-referenced the number of CTO’s with the top 10 industries (that mattered to us) and with their time in their current position.

We did this because the CTO’s (or in the case of bigger companies, someone with the role of IT Manager/Infrastructure Manager) should be the main persons that take care of a company’s cloud infrastructure.

This responsibility implies that the CTO must have a profound understanding of the technology and servers they use, and all the packages and dependencies that are related to that infrastructure.

He is the sole responsible for driving online business growth.

The Analysis

Let’s dive into the numbers.

What we can see is that out of 16716 CTO’s, 76% of them (top 3 industries) are working in/for companies that rely on the internet.

We can correlate that the demand for CTO’s in these industries are growing every year, due to the fact that more and more businesses understand the shift towards digitalization.

If we take the top 3 industries and look at the headcount of the business, we can see the following graph.

Right from the start, we can see that companies that have between 1 and 200 employees are the ones that have the highest need for CTO’s.

This might mean that smaller companies, that are presumably more agile, understand the fundamental need of a CTO, due to their online business model.

Also, if we investigate the time these CTO’s have been in their position, at their current company, we see that some industries are adapted to the online business model (Information Technology & Services, Computer Software, Internet) and they tend to keep their CTO’s on a long term.

* the fact that there are 2475 CTO’s that started almost 2 years ago in their current job, at the above mentioned 3 industries, does not mean that with the passing of time, eventually, they won’t be moving to the next categories (3–5 years, 6–10 years, more than 10 years).

The final statistics, let’s cross-reference the lifespan of a CTO job title with the company size.

We can correlate once again, that the companies between 1–200 employees, being more presumably agile, have a bigger need for technical leadership in the key position for digitalization.

The Results

At first glance, these numbers might be interpreted as positive. However, when we take into account the size of US industries, we can actually see that they’re more negative than expected.

There are 17.383 CTO’s on LinkedIn, in the 10 industries we’ve looked for.

But in these 10 industries, there are 1.335.646 companies.

This means that only 1% of these companies have a proper person/team to take care of their online infrastructure.

We can presume that the other 99% are on the traditional Shared Hosting or VPS model (or they simply haven’t asked their CTO to update his LinkedIn profile).

And not to mention that there will be more companies created by individuals working from home. And they don’t have the proper knowledge to create an online infrastructure. They don’t need to.

All they might need is to have a platform/portal/interface to create a server and to one-click install a CMS (like Wordpress) or an e-commerce shop (like Magento).

And for the businesses, they didn’t have an urgency to migrate to the cloud, because their client’s online behavior was (almost) predictable and it could be aided by offline events (ex: presentations, meetings, brick&mortar shops, etc).

But with this sudden twist of circumstance, almost all the population that is in lockdown will have but one option to “connect” and buy “stuff”.

And that’s through the internet.

From a different angle, when the internet appeared, the fax machine was vastly used amongst the B2B sector.

And because of the technical requirements that “being on the internet” involved, not a lot of companies switched fast enough.

When you fast forward a couple of years, it is clear that the companies that relied solely on the fax machine (aka the late adopters of the internet) had a great disadvantage against their competitors, who already “switched to online”.

Extrapolating the analogy, we pre-emptively presume that businesses that solely rely on Shared Hosting & VPS will soon face a difficult challenge.

What used to be a good choice, now it won’t be.

Shared Hosting & VPS’s are not built for speed if traffic surges happen and it might crash their whole website/app.

We estimate that in the following months, more companies will have to move to the cloud, and the ones that won’t, will have a higher price for their hosting. (because they need to upgrade to the next payment plan, because they need to accommodate the extra users on their website/app, because there are more users online, which is due to SARS-COVID-19).

And on top of that, more and more individuals will create accounts with Shared Hosting & VPS companies, because that’s where the average know-how (on how to start an online business) is at the current time. This means that the server’s same CPU & RAM power will be distributed to even more accounts than before.

All the shared resources will slow down due to extra accounts. It won’t matter if you’re a company or an individual.

And because we can’t grow experienced CTO’s/cloud experts/technical persons overnight, and with a growing demand for digitalization, there might be a shortage of expertise so that everybody can switch to cloud.

Because we want to democratize and raise the cloud adoption (+ that we’ve mentioned about the solution at the beginning of the article), read about our proposal below.

When our founder, Alin Dobra, started thinking of our platform, he was working as a CTO at a well-known startup.

Observing that being on cloud faced the same repetitive tasks, he decided to create a platform where all these tasks are automated. Years of experience and up to date adjustments are transformed into Bunnyshell, cloud management and automation platform that can suit and adjust to your cloud requirements through simple, clickable buttons.

Bunnyshell is now a robust tool to Manage, Automate & Deploy everything from infrastructure management to application deployment.

Following a $1.000.000 investment and within 1 year, big local brands like BestValue, GoMag, and others turned into Bunnyshell early adopters. Using our tool, of Bunnyshell and through it, they achieved easily, what used to take months. Cloud Freedom.

What seems like “Cloud adoption”, fundamentally, the CTO and the owner of the company decided to implement our platform because they wanted better speed and uptime.

And as technology advances, moving from Shared Hosting & VPS “to the Cloud” is the next stepping stone for most businesses.

Therefore, as a conclusion.

If you’re a company that wants to move to the cloud, but don’t know how or don’t have the proper team to do so, try Bunnyshell.

If you want to create an online business from scratch, try Bunnyshell.

To come and aid within this major pandemic, we’ve shifted our pricing to accommodate everybody’s needs.

Hence, for the next 6 months, it gets easier for NGOs, Medical and Educational Industry, to build their online architecture because we’re offering a free account for all the companies (in these 3 industries) that are actively engaged in finding a solution amid SARS-COVID-19.

For the SME that wants to migrate to the cloud, we halved our pricing plan for the next 12 months and offer free migration to the cloud.

You take care of your business. We take care of your business.

Better speed and uptime.