The economic downturns caused by the coronavirus pandemic have affected many industries, and some of them might take months or even years before they can recover. This means the budgets will have to be cut going forward as companies re-strategize. While other industries have it rough, cloud infrastructure projects, collaboration tools, and communications equipment are going the opposite direction. According to Forbes, the average cloud spending has gone up 59% from 2018 to over $73 million in 2020. With the shifting workplace preferences, companies that had not made digital transformation a priority will face a hard time. They will be in a difficult position than those who have embraced technology.

The recent surge in ransomware attacks against cloud hosting platforms has left many organizations scratching their heads, wondering about the security of their systems. When cyber-attacks are used to compromise hosted systems, it impacts data and can also expose critical customer data. Unlike in the past, where ransomware was used target organizations and their systems, malicious individuals are now targeting cloud systems of big cloud service providers. Like never before, the challenge posed by these threats has proven to be growing. According to statistics by the FBI, US businesses lost more than $3 million as payment of ransom to hackers in 2018 alone. This does not include lost businesses, wages, data, and time that were lost in the process.

Cloud computing is transforming all industries and the more traditional manufacturing sector is not excluded from this transformation. Manufacturers face steep competition from legacy competitors along with niche startups. Many US manufacturing industries beyond technology have seen a decline in employment over the last 20 years. However, US manufacturing output has seen double digit growth over the same time period. The economics of manufacturing in the US and elsewhere in the world is a very complex set of topics that is best left to economists, but some discussion related to technology is relevant here.

As cloud computing continues attracting the attention of many industries and disciplines, life sciences appear to be taking the right strides towards the use of cloud computing platforms. The greatest benefit of this technology in this discipline is its scalability, innovation, and flexibility. The cloud-based technologies give life sciences the capability to access more resources and processing scale. With the cloud, datasets can be anonymized and shared with ease. This will be a great enabler of the new strategies on artificial intelligence, which include drug discovery. However, some experts have warned that the cloud will not automatically create benefits, reduce costs, or enhance security, that is one of the requirements in any discipline. It is upon each organization or user to determine the processes that can be removed through a transition to the cloud and the new capabilities that can be accessed through the cloud platforms.