The following summary, based on announcements made between mid-March and late March 2020, covers the major moves by hyperscalers and enterprise software vendors during that period.

Hyperscaler Highlights

Alibaba Cloud

On March 23, 2020, Alibaba Cloud announced that the Alibaba Foundation and the Jack Ma Foundation had launched the Global MediXchange for Combating COVID-19. The initiative, supported by Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and Alibaba Health, aimed to facilitate cross-border communication and collaboration, and to provide computing capacity and data intelligence for COVID-19 research efforts.

Separately, Alibaba Cloud had already offered credits to organisations purchasing its Elastic Compute Service and cybersecurity products. The company also made its AI-powered analysis platform freely available to research institutions focused on treating and preventing coronavirus.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

On March 20, 2020, AWS announced a $20 million commitment through the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative. The programme was open to accredited research institutions and private entities using AWS infrastructure to support the development of COVID-19 testing and diagnostics.

The initiative was assembled alongside 35 global research institutions, startups, and companies, and was guided by an external technical advisory group of scientists and global health policy experts. More details are available at the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative page.

Google Cloud

On March 3, 2020, Google announced that it was rolling out free access to advanced Google Meet (then Hangouts Meet) videoconferencing capabilities to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers globally. The expanded access included:

• Meetings of up to 250 participants per call
• Live streaming to up to 100,000 viewers
• The ability to record meetings and save them directly to Google Drive

On March 17, Google also postponed its annual Cloud Next conference, having already moved the April 6–8 event to a virtual-only format.

IBM

On March 22, 2020, IBM announced it was collaborating with the White House, the US Department of Energy, and other partners to launch the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. IBM pledged to pool a substantial amount of computing power across 16 systems, comprising more than 330 petaflops of compute, 775,000 CPU cores, and 34,000 GPUs, to help researchers better understand COVID-19, its treatments, and potential cures.

The consortium committed to evaluating research proposals from around the world and providing supercomputing access to the projects most likely to have immediate impact. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were also reported to be part of the consortium.

Microsoft

On March 19, 2020, Microsoft announced that National Health Service (NHS) staff in the UK could use Microsoft Teams for free. NHS Digital rolled out Teams across all NHSmail users between March 16 and March 20.

In the United States, Microsoft collaborated with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to build a coronavirus self-checker chatbot called Clara. The bot was designed to help people evaluate their symptoms and make informed decisions about seeking medical care. The tool was reported on March 23, 2020.

On March 24, ZDNet reported that Microsoft was throttling certain services — including SharePoint and OneNote — to maintain performance across Office 365 as demand spiked globally.

Timeline: Enterprise and SaaS Vendor Responses

Beyond the hyperscalers, a broad range of enterprise software and security vendors made commitments during this period. The following timeline captures the major announcements in reverse chronological order.

March 24 — SAP

SAP announced it was making part of its online learning portal available for free for 90 days. Access covered four selected learning journeys for students interested in building careers in the SAP ecosystem.

March 23 — Banyan Security

San Francisco-based Banyan Security announced free access to its Zero Trust network security offering for a limited time, to help organisations support secure remote workforces during the pandemic.

March 23 — Cisco

Cisco committed $225 million to COVID-19 response efforts, including support for healthcare, education, government response, and critical technology. Of that total, $8 million was in cash and $210 million in products. A portion was directed to the United Nations Foundation’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.

March 20 — Huawei

Huawei announced it had collaborated with Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Lanwon Technology on an AI-powered imaging tool to assist doctors in diagnosing and quantitatively analysing COVID-19 from medical scans, helping reduce the diagnostic burden on radiology departments.

March 17 — ServiceNow

ServiceNow announced it was making certain applications available for free to any public agency in the world to assist with pandemic response. The primary offering was an emergency response operations app originally built by Washington State on the ServiceNow platform.

March 17 — Okta

Okta began offering free single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to any organisation needing secure remote access during the pandemic. The company stated that any organisation that could benefit from the Okta Identity Cloud for remote work in an emergency should be able to use it at no cost.

March 17 — Dropbox

Dropbox announced free Dropbox Business and HelloSign Enterprise subscriptions for a three-month period, available to non-profits and NGOs focused on fighting COVID-19.

March 16 — Box

Box CEO Aaron Levie announced via Twitter that anyone working on COVID-19 research or response could email rapid-response@box.com to set up free secure file sharing and storage through the Box platform.

March 16 — Slack

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield announced that people and organisations working on COVID-19 research, response, or mitigation were eligible for free upgrades to paid Slack plans, along with consultation support for remote collaboration best practices.

The Broader Picture: Cloud Infrastructure Under Stress

The pandemic put extraordinary load on internet infrastructure. Consumer-facing services felt the pressure most visibly — Zoom experienced intermittent outages, and Netflix voluntarily reduced its streaming video quality in Europe to ease network congestion. Behind the scenes, cloud providers were managing sharp spikes in demand for compute, storage, and networking from both enterprise and public-sector customers simultaneously.

The coordinated response from cloud vendors — offering free tiers, waiving fees for healthcare and research customers, and contributing to shared computing consortia — represented a notable moment in which commercial cloud infrastructure was positioned explicitly as critical public infrastructure. For DevOps and platform engineering teams, the period also highlighted the importance of elastic scaling, multi-region redundancy, and pre-negotiated enterprise agreements that include disaster response provisions.

Key Takeaways for Engineering Teams

• Free tier and emergency credits are real levers. During a crisis, cloud vendors may offer emergency credits or waive fees. Understanding your vendor’s disaster response programmes before a crisis occurs is worth the effort.
• Zero Trust security tools can be deployed quickly. Vendors like Okta and Banyan Security demonstrated that identity and access management can be provisioned rapidly for large distributed workforces.
• Supercomputing consortia can aggregate capacity. The COVID-19 HPC Consortium showed how commercial cloud and government HPC resources can be pooled at scale for research workloads that exceed what any single institution can provide.
• Throttling is a legitimate capacity management tool. Microsoft’s decision to throttle SharePoint and OneNote to protect core Office 365 services is a real-world example of graceful degradation under load — a pattern applicable to any distributed system.

This article is based on announcements and reports published between March 16 and March 24, 2020. Original source reporting was attributed to CloudTech (cloudcomputing-news.net).

What Is Database Migration?

Database migration is the process of moving data, applications, and associated workloads from one platform or location to another. In a cloud context this typically means moving from on-premises infrastructure — or from a competing cloud — to a target cloud environment, with the goals of reducing operational overhead, improving scalability, and controlling cost.

Why Migrate a Database to the Cloud?

Common motivations for cloud database migration include:

• Cost optimisation — pay-as-you-go billing replaces large upfront hardware investment.
• Scalability — cloud-managed databases can scale vertically or horizontally on demand.
• Data availability and durability — managed services typically offer multi-AZ replication and automated backups.
• Reduced manual effort — patching, upgrades, and failover are handled by the provider.
• Data integrity — purpose-built migration tools include checksums and validation to verify data fidelity.
• Improved operational efficiency — freeing DBA time from routine maintenance allows focus on higher-value work.

Cloud Database Migration Services Compared

1. AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) is a fully managed service that supports migration of relational databases, data warehouses, NoSQL databases, and other data stores. It is one of the most mature offerings in this space and supports a broad range of source and target engine combinations.

Key capabilities

• Homogeneous migrations — same engine on source and target (e.g., Oracle to Oracle).
• Heterogeneous migrations — different engines (e.g., Oracle to Amazon Aurora). The AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) is used alongside DMS to convert the schema and stored code.
• Minimal downtime — the source database remains fully operational during migration; DMS uses ongoing replication to keep the target in sync until cutover.
• Flexible topology — supports cloud-to-cloud, on-premises-to-cloud, and hybrid (on-premises-to-cloud combined) scenarios.

Pricing

AWS offers a free tier for migrations to Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, or Amazon DynamoDB for the first six months. For other migrations, pricing is based on the replication instance compute resources consumed. Additional charges apply for log storage beyond the included allowance. Current pricing is published on the AWS DMS pricing page.

2. Google Cloud Data Transfer Services

Rather than a single monolithic service, Google Cloud offers a family of data transfer products, each optimised for a specific scenario.

Cloud Storage Transfer Service also exposes a JSON API, allowing teams to script and automate transfers in the language of their choice. This makes it well-suited to DevOps pipelines where migration tasks need to be triggered programmatically.

Pricing

Google Cloud charges for storage capacity used, network egress, API operations, and (where applicable) early deletion fees. Costs vary by storage class and region. Current rates are on the Google Cloud Storage pricing page.

3. Azure Database Migration Service (Azure DMS)

Azure Database Migration Service is a fully managed service designed to handle migrations from multiple source engines to Azure-managed database services. It is closely integrated with the Azure portal and the Data Migration Assistant (DMA) tool.

Supported source engines

• SQL Server
• PostgreSQL
• MySQL
• MongoDB

Supported target engines

• Azure SQL Database
• Azure SQL Managed Instance
• Azure Database for PostgreSQL
• Azure Database for MySQL
• Azure Cosmos DB (MongoDB API)

Migration modes

Azure DMS supports two migration modes:

• Offline migration — the database is taken offline at the start of the migration. Simpler to orchestrate but involves planned downtime. Available on the Standard tier at no charge.
• Online migration — continuous replication keeps the source database live during the migration, with a brief cutover window. Recommended for production workloads with tight availability requirements. Requires the Premium tier.

The Data Migration Assistant (DMA) can be run before migration to generate compatibility assessment reports and flag breaking changes or deprecated features, helping teams address issues before cutover.

Pricing

• Standard tier — free; supports offline migrations; available in 1, 2, and 4 vCore configurations.
• Premium tier — billed at a predictable hourly rate per provisioned vCore; supports online migrations. Microsoft has offered a free period for Premium 4-vCore instances for new migrations (verify current promotion on the Azure pricing page).

4. IBM Lift

IBM Lift is a migration utility designed specifically to move databases from on-premises data centers to IBM Cloud. The tool orchestrates the full migration pipeline — extraction from the source, secure transfer over the network, and loading into the target.

Key capabilities

• Live source database — IBM Lift captures incremental changes made to the source database during the migration and replays them to the target, keeping the source operational and minimising downtime.
• Encrypted transfer — data is transmitted over a 256-bit encrypted connection end-to-end, protecting sensitive data in transit.
• Controlled migration steps — teams retain visibility and control over each stage: extract, transfer, and load.

Pricing

IBM Lift has been available at no charge. Confirm current availability and any attached IBM Cloud service costs on the IBM Cloud catalogue.

5. Alibaba Cloud Data Transmission Service (DTS)

Alibaba Cloud’s Data Transmission Service (DTS) is a managed migration and replication service that supports a wide range of database types, including relational databases, NoSQL stores, and OLAP systems.

Key capabilities

• Homogeneous and heterogeneous migrations — supports same-engine moves (e.g., MySQL to MySQL) and cross-engine moves (e.g., Oracle to MySQL).
• Flexible source and target topology — supports on-premises to RDS, ECS-hosted databases to RDS, RDS to ECS, and RDS to RDS migrations.
• Continuous replication — DTS replicates changes from the source to the target in real time during migration, keeping the source database available and reducing the risk of data loss at cutover.
• High availability — the continuous change capture mechanism also serves as a foundation for ongoing replication after initial migration if needed.

Pricing

Alibaba Cloud DTS pricing is based on the instance specification selected for the migration task and the duration of use. Current pricing is available in the Alibaba Cloud console and documentation.

Side-by-Side Summary

Choosing the Right Service

The right migration service depends on where your data currently lives, where it needs to go, and what downtime budget you have. A few practical guidelines:

• If your target is an AWS-managed database, AWS DMS is the natural choice, especially given the free migration period for Aurora, Redshift, and DynamoDB.
• If you need to ingest large volumes of SaaS data into a data warehouse, BigQuery Data Transfer Service offers native scheduling and automation.
• If you are migrating to Azure and need pre-migration compatibility assessment, the Data Migration Assistant paired with Azure DMS provides a structured, guided process.
• For IBM Cloud destinations with a zero-cost requirement, IBM Lift is worth evaluating first.
• For mixed Alibaba Cloud environments involving RDS or ECS instances, Alibaba Cloud DTS provides the tightest integration with the platform.

Always run a proof-of-concept migration on a non-production copy of your data before committing to a production cutover, regardless of which service you choose.