COVID-19: E-com, VoD, gaming and edtech seeing significant growth in customer base, Prabhakar JayKumar, DigitalOcean

There is growing demand for cloud infrastructure in Indian businesses due to the COVID-19 pandemic. What kind of enquiries are you getting from the current customers ?
Cloud is the backbone for most of the new-age tech businesses.  Given the increase in people working from home and the lockdown situation across the country, businesses in the domains of e-commerce, video streaming, gaming and ed-tech to name a few are seeing significant growth in their customer base and as an extension, there is increased usage of cloud infrastructure to keep up with the growing demand they are seeing in their businesses.

Many of your customers are start-ups. They are bearing the brunt of COVID-19. What concessions are you offering them and what’s the strategy to offer support to start-ups.
One of the core values at DigitalOcean is “Our community is bigger than just us”.  Our mission to serve the global community is now even more urgent as we feel the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and we are committed to supporting developers and entrepreneurs all over the world.

We know how powerful technology can be in making real change and driving positive outcomes in the face of challenges and for this reason, we launched our Hub for Good program.

As part of the DigitalOcean Hub for Good, we have committed to the following:

1. $100,000 in infrastructure credits. These grants support our core community of developers and innovators who are using technology to make a positive impact on the world. We are providing up to $1,000 in credits to each new, not-for-profit project related to COVID-19 that needs cloud services.
2. $50,000 cash donation to our COVID-19 Relief Fund. We understand that the most immediate needs are often economic in nature, and we are honored to support medical professionals on the frontlines, researchers leading scientific developments and initiatives, and those who are facing particular turmoil during this time.
3. Raise awareness of COVID-19-related projects, and provide learning resources to developers. We share these projects on our portal to attract more volunteers and collaborators across the globe, while continuing to support developers as they learn and iterate on their ideas.

Please discuss the experience of providing work from home at a massive scale (Bandwidth management, API handling, etc)
Most of the applications such as video and audio streaming and real-time communication  whose usage has spiked in the Covid-19 environment are bandwidth-intensive. Bandwidth costs on most cloud platforms can be substantial and constitute a significant portion of a customer’s cloud computing costs.

DigitalOcean has proven especially popular with companies developing network-intensive apps because we charge only ~10-20% of what other clouds do for bandwidth. The savings can easily add up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars for apps that require large scale.

Your views on the security concern when working from home?
The view that working from home could lead to security concerns is a myth. The following are some basics that need to be followed to ensure security:

• Enabling access to critical applications and data through a VPN
• Having security software installed on individual machines and keeping the software up-to-date

How do you see the future of cloud in a post-COVID-19 scenario? How will the view change and why ?
Given that most startups and businesses these days are “born in the cloud”, the number of businesses that will continue to leverage the cloud to manage and grow their businesses will only continue to increase.