Today, the entire world is going through a crisis that is different than the natural calamities that we imagine when we think of the term disaster. As we have read in the news and social media feeds, more than half of the world’s population is taking shelter within their homes to fight the spread of COVID19.
Due to this lockdown, many web platforms are experiencing a tremendous increase in traffic and usage. Typically B2B applications, business processes, internal IT applications & local services websites are usually expected to handle gradual scaling, not to the tune of 8x/10x within a few days. Even Disaster Recovery plans mostly assume that only a fraction of the actual workload will hit the DR sites. Primarily because a disaster is imagined to be Earthquakes, Tsunami’s or Floods, where we assume that only a portion of the users Less (Not More) will eventually access these systems during a crisis.
However, COVID19 has shown us that there are disasters where More (Not Less) people would need to use critical applications/websites to keep functioning during the crisis. B2C sites like Netflix, on the other hand, are focused on increasing user base and are better prepared to scale and handle peaks. This is the primary reason why during this crisis, Netflix continues to stream sitcoms for us, while many critical applications e.g. government unemployment websites are severely strained and crashing under the increased user load.
Irony today is that we are seamlessly able to stream Netflix in a time of crisis, whereas critical applications supporting local utilities and services are severely hampered by the user load.
At CloudHedge, we are committed in our fight against COVID19 and would like to assist websites and portals who have maxed out the capacity they planned for. If these portals deal with on-field operations, Healthcare, or day to day essentials items/information then we will transform these web applications voluntarily to keep the fight on!
If you or someone in your network is part of the heroic IT teams that are making ends meet to keep these critical web portals running under increased user load, please reach out to us at hello@cloudhedge.io and allow us to contribute to this fight against COVID19 in a small way.
Stay Home, Stay Safe, Stay Connected for this Too Shall Pass…
