With so many people working remotely this piece will look at the issues that some people are having with their remote communication services, some additional news on the impact of COVID-19 on storage and memory product production and then look at some developments in cloud storage and remote services that are helping workers remain productive at home.
OpenVault said that COVID-19 broadband usage shows signs of reaching a plateau in markets where workers have been told to stay at home, according to their network measurements. However upstream usage during business hours (sending content into the cloud) continues to grow, increasing 82.5% from January through April 3 (note that many network companies typically plan on usage with about 90% downloads and 10% uploads).
A report based upon a survey of 1,065 American adults from Waveform CEO Sina Khanifar on March 30th says that 57.7% of the US workforce recently started working from home due to coronavirus and that 15.5% of Americans are having issues with internet connectivity daily and 12.5% of respondents reported experiencing bad or very bad cell signal reception in their home.
Based upon data from Plume Cloud, metro areas in quarantined cities is up significantly since the COVID-19 stay at home orders as shown in the image below. The total number of people active online during the work day is up 105% since the quarantine began.
People Active Online at Home during the Work Day
A report from Atlas VPN said that the number of phishing websites has spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their report says that while in January Google registered a total of 149,195 active phishing websites, by February there was a 50% increase to 293,235 registered phishing websites. By March this reached 522,495 phishing websites. 316,523 of the phishing websites in March contained coronavirus related content.
COVID-19 has had an impact on the production of important components for digital storage and memory. It slowed the production of DRAM and NAND flash in many Asian factories, which are now gradually going back to full production where the quarantines have eased. In South East Asia HDD factories and their component suppliers have been impacted by the pandemic. According to Trendfocus, this has impacted aluminum finished substrate factories as well as Malaysian and Singaporean-based media factories. In the Philippines HDD manufacturing ceased for several days in March.
Various companies are offering storage solutions that may help with security and data protection and management issues brought on by employees working at home.
Zerto is offering their IT Resilience solution free for six months to organizations on the frontlines of the pandemic. Zoom is offering extended free use of its remote conference services leading to a surge of users and increasing issues with security of these conferences. DriveSavers offered its data recovery assistance to businesses working from home. The company says that their remote data recovery services can help prevent data loss from crashed storage devices. Backblaze announced in March that it has grown to storing more than 1 Exabyte of storage since its start in 2007 with customers in over 160 countries. Backblaze offers both business and personal remote backup.
Cloudian and Veeam announced a storage solution to provide ransomware protection with an end-to-end, on-premises backup architecture using S3 Object Lock to ensure backup data is unchangeable, in February. In March, Scale Computing offered Acronis Cloud Storage for enhanced data backup, disaster recovery and ransomware mitigation. The company says that by offering Acronis Cloud Storage, Scale Computing provides customers with a safe, secure and easy place to back up data with advanced backup and protection features including granular object-level recovery, variable-length deduplication for backups and active ransomware protection.
COVID-19 has increased demand for communication infrastructure, particularly to support more content uploading needed by professionals working at home. It has also led to increased phishing from COVID-19 related websites. Companies are offering storage and other services that can address the needs of home workers during a pandemic.
