Source:-crn.com

Cloud startups are operating at a time when cloud computing increasingly has become a lifeline for people living, working and learning during the coronavirus pandemic.

“With remote learning, work from home and more applications and technology needing to be accessed during this ‘new normal’…the shift to cloud computing over the last few years is now the ‘hearts and lungs’ core technology and infrastructure enabling companies and governments globally to operate smoothly during this unprecedented environment,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said in a report this month. “While applications such as Zoom, DocuSign, Citrix, Microsoft Teams and Slack among others are on the front lines enabling collaboration and functionality for consumers and enterprises globally, it’s the back-end public/hybrid cloud stalwarts such as Amazon (Web Services), Microsoft (Azure) and Google (Cloud) ultimately facilitating virtual offices and communications globally.”

And startups, backed by venture funding, continue to feed off that system.

While global information technology spending is projected to slide 8 percent to $3.4 trillion this year due to the impacts of the coronavirus and a global economic recession, cloud computing spending is expected to increase by 19 percent, according to research firm Gartner.

Cloud migrations and infrastructure projects are being fast-tracked well-ahead of expectations, as many enterprises “find themselves caught flat-footed with a lack of cloud-enabled functionality,” according to Ives.

“We believe this coronavirus pandemic is a key turning point in the technology world around deploying cloud-driven environments, as our long standing projections of moving from 33 percent of workloads in the cloud to 55 percent by 2022 now look conservative, as these targets could be reached a full year ahead of expectations given this pace,” he said. “With our expectations of a trillion dollars to be spent in the cloud over the next decade there will be many beneficiaries –cyber security, data center plays, cloud stack/enablers, hybrid cloud, applications — across the technology landscape, with Microsoft Azure and AWS two of the core vendors that will continue to see an acceleration of cloud infrastructure spending during and after this dark coronavirus storm passes.”

Here’s a look at a sampling of cloud computing startups to watch.