Letters | Coronavirus crisis: how China hit the fast track to a multi-cloud future for remote working

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Working from home in Shanghai on March 9, amid a waning coronavirus outbreak in China. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 6:30am, 23 Mar 2020Updated: 6:30am, 23 Mar 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought restrictions on the movement and congregation of people, forcing companies to operate businesses and manage staff remotely.

Overnight, China became the world’s largest work-from-home market, with Hong Kong following soon after.

Remote working has traditionally been a perk of joining a start-up and a way for cool tech to attract the best and brightest. Covid-19 has catapulted this trend into the mainstream in a matter of weeks, making remote working the accepted way of doing business for tens of thousands of employees and hundreds of companies nationwide.

A survey of over 1,400 Chinese companies in February found that 32 per cent of companies that resumed work were permitting employees to work from home. Even the Hong Kong government adopted a work from home policy for an entire month, while schools switched to online teaching.

Covid-19 and other recent disruptive events have not only forced, but accelerated Greater China’s shift to the cloud.

Virtual desktop infrastructure and desktop as a service are perfect examples of how cloud technology is keeping Greater China businesses running during the outbreak. They permit staff to safely and securely access company data from anywhere, on any device, while ensuring network integrity.