The role of cloud computing technology: A savior to fight the lockdown in COVID 19 crisis, the benefits, characteristics and applications

Abstract

The contagion of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) led to a global lockdown that put governments in emergency mode. With the total number of positive cases worldwide exceeding the 97.46 million mark, social distancing appears to be the only effective strategy to contain the virus at the moment. As a result, companies face obstacles and find it difficult to respond to this current challenge of remote working. The impact of the novel COVID-19 has created many new challenges, and many of us have had to adopt new ways of working. With the need for accessing to critical applications and the scalability of the infrastructure, cloud computing is emerging as an underlying technology. The cloud technology had a major role in fighting the epidemic; it becomes a salvation for governments and organizations in numerous fields of life, education, health, industry, communication, remote surveillance, and more information. Therefore, this study presents the benefits, characteristics and applications of cloud computing and explains how the cloud contributes to improving life in all regions of the world during COVID-19. It shows that the cloud computing helps countries in combating COVID 19, in education and health sectors, also in the economic and commercial aspects. It investigates the current state by distributing an online questionnaire to various people of academic and non-academic backgrounds in different places over the world in the ICT and education sectors. The results showed that there is an effective role for cloud computing during the epidemic.

Cloud-based accounting information systems usage and its impact on Jordanian SMEs’ performance: the post-COVID-19 perspective

“…cloud applications) in the context of SMEs facilitates streamlining the services delivery to businesses, clients and other stakeholders; most recently, it has been deemed a life-sustaining instrument in terms of crisis management (i.e. COVID-19), as it offers the opportunity to improve the services delivery, collaborative and communications efforts (Al-Okaily et al , 2021a, 2021b; Alhomdy et al , 2021; Alkhwaldi and Abdulmuhsin, 2021; Okaily et al , 2022). In this regard, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends using online services that could assist in controlling the spread of the Coronavirus (Almajali et al , 2022).…”

An Improved Ant Colony Algorithm for Solving a Virtual Machine Placement Problem in a Cloud Computing Environment

“…The propagation delay can be measured by the number of route hops passed in the propagation process. The propagation delay matrix B = (b ln ) M ×M can be represented by (3), where b ln represents the number of switches or routers passing through between two physical machines Pl and Pn, the greater the number, the greater the communication delay. The total network traffic objective function is expressed by (4), where π ij represents a virtual machine V i , deployed on a physical machine V j .…”

“…At present, another impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the scale of cloud computing data centers is expanding rapidly. This is due on the one hand to distance working/learning/entertainment, and on the other hand to the implementation of healthcare applications imposed by the countries [1]- [3]. These latter applications are required to provide many healthcare related services (mainly they are used to provide digital proof that a person has been vaccinated against COVID-19, has recovered from COVID-19 or has a test result).…”

Cloud computing usage by governmental organizations in Saudi Arabia based on Vision 2030

“…A paradigm change in Information Technology (IT) is taking place with cloud computing (CC). With its digital architecture and expanded information storage capabilities, CC is described as a dynamic innovation platform that covers a wide range of needs (Alhomdy et al, 2021). Even more advantageous is the fact that CC provides access to software or equipment without major capital expenditures, as well as quick access to applications and administrations that may be recognized with little service provider contact (Ireda et al, 2019).…”