Over the past few months, it has become clear that technology can do many things than we had initially imagined. From meetings to working from home and ordering items, groceries of food, we can now do almost everything while seated at our comfortable couches at home. All these became clear after the coronavirus pandemic. Since the beginning of this unprecedented transition, cloud businesses have benefited the most. This came as companies increasingly moved their data and information to a digital platform so that they can continue dispensing services even as their physical premises remain closed.

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.

As COVID-19 continues changing norms across industries, the impact is emerging in the IT industry. Many companies are moving their IT services are moving to the cloud as a way of enhancing service provision. Although companies were already shifting their operations from onsite to the cloud pre-Covid-19, the shift has been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic as well as lockdown and social distancing measures put in place to limit infections. This change is suddenly being felt as many players are now laying off their staff. For instance, IBM, under its new chief executive officer, is cutting off several jobs as a result of these changes. Although the number of staff that will be laid off is still not known, the Wall Street Journal reports that it is likely to be in thousands out of its original number of 352,600 as of the end of 2019.