The coronavirus pandemic is forcing Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to battle-test their clouds like never before. Here's why experts say the companies are ready.

Chip Somodevilla / Staff

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

• As more people turn to remote work, online learning, and entertainment streaming services during the coronavirus crisis, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are facing increased usage. Two experts say that those clouds are up to the challenge.
• Generally, AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud all stress-test their systems frequently and have data centers all over the world, providing protection in case of site failures.
• Each have also enacted new measures specifically geared towards the coronavirus pandemic.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

As the coronavirus pandemic disrupts businesses around the world, it's an unprecedented test of the capacity and reliability of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google's clouds to keep applications running smoothly.

People are increasingly working from home, learning remotely, and relying on streaming services like Netflix and Hulu for entertainment as they stay inside, while healthcare and government organizations are spinning up new applications to fight COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

All of this tests the capacity and availability of the cloud. If cloud-based applications are slow or unreliable, it could affect the productivity and wellness of people worldwide. Will the three biggest providers be able to rise to the challenge?

Two analysts who spoke to Business Insider think that they will. Craig Lowery, research vice president at Gartner, thinks that this crisis could even accelerate cloud adoption overall.

"It's far from being a problem for cloud providers," Lowery told Business Insider. "This pandemic is a huge boom: It allows them to really shine."

Here's why experts think that the big three cloud providers are ready to handle the coronavirus crisis:

Billions invested and data centers all around the world

The top three cloud players - AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud - are powered by some of the richest companies in the world. Each of them have invested billions in their platforms, with massive scale and reliability in mind, said Dave Bartoletti, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester.

"The reason those three have become the global players is because of how much money they've been able to spend on building out infrastructure and having storage capacity and network capacity," Bartoletti told Business Insider. "Very few companies have billions of dollars every quarter to invest in that kind of build out. That's what these providers have been doing."

In Alphabet's fourth quarter earnings, for example, Google's parent company said that the bulk of its $6.6 billion in capital expenditures was spent on its data centers (followed by servers and office facilities).

This kind of spending has allowed AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud to set up data centers all over the world, which allows them to scale and have redundancy in case of failures. If one data center or site goes down, there are others for backup.

"Having all that extra bandwidth between regions lets [the cloud companies] shift demand to another region or a zone without totally killing user experience or totally killing performance," Bartoletti said. He said that recent investments have let the cloud companies "double or triple their network load capacity."

That data center investment and design allows them to shift loads and provide service closer to end users, wherever they are. "They bring a lot of capability with their distributed nature," Gartner's Lowery said.

AWS, Google, and Microsoft also have processes in place for scaling up in times of increased usage. While the pandemic crisis has a unique effect on cloud usage, all three providers have spent time and resources on preparing for unusual circumstances. All three stress-test their global infrastructure regularly, running drills on what they would do if an entire facility went down.

"Capacity planning is something companies did in their data centers for a long time," Bartoletti said. "If AWS wanted its clients to have this experience of unlimited capacity, they're constantly doing capacity planning and building out additional capacity."

'They put their money where their mouth is'

Beyond that general preparedness, the three cloud giants have all adapted this specific moment.

"All three of them had statements up on how they were preparing their infrastructures," Bartoletti said.

AWS said it's leaning on its pandemic response policies and procedures to keep its operations running, including by transferring operations from one region. Microsoft, which says it has seen a spike in its chat app Teams, says it's prioritizing health and safety organizations, while placing temporary restrictions for other customers, such as limits on free offers and "certain resources" for new subscriptions. Google Cloud also says it has done regular disaster recovery and support capacity testing for over a decade.

"They were all spot on, approaching it a little differently," Bartoletti said. "It takes that headache off a lot of people. The way I've been telling people about it is, 'They put their money where their mouth is.'"

Bartoletti suggests that customers pay attention to the pandemic response plans of the clouds they use and check for updates regularly. Customers should make sure they are making their cloud spend as efficient as possible and tracking how they use cloud services, so that a sudden spike doesn't catch them off guard, he said.

Beyond stepping up to make sure the services that customers are paying for work smoothly, all three vendors are working with health and government organizations during the pandemic and Google and Microsoft are offering free access to their office software.

Risks exist, but this could also be cloud's big moment

Despite all preparations, there are still, of course, some risks.

As Bartoletti puts it: "Nobody's capacity planning is perfect."

There are just so many unknowns related to the pandemic, Bartoletti says. Plus, a natural disaster like an earthquake or a fire could always happen at the same time. If the pandemic continues to get worse, if too many places shut down at once, that could actually overwhelm capacity, he said.

Ultimately though, Lowery and other analysts think that this could be a turning point for the cloud.

Dan Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities, wrote in a note to clients that "this coronavirus pandemic is a key turning point in the technology world around deploying cloud driven environments." Wedbush's projections that 55% of workloads would be moved to the cloud by 2022 now look conservative, he wrote. Those targets could be reached a year ahead, given the current pace.

Similarly, Lowery describes this as "the cloud's moment."

"There's some that say after the pandemic passes, we'll go back to normal: All of the capacity these cloud service providers had to bring online will go unused. I don't think that will happen," Lowery said. "The likely outcome is people will use as much as they can, but they won't go back to normal because they discovered the things that helped them."

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