The role of cloud computing technology: A savior to fight the lockdown in COVID 19 crisis, the benefits, characteristics and applications

The contagion of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) led to a global lockdown that put governments in emergency mode. With the total number of positive cases worldwide exceeding the 97.46 million mark, social distancing appears to be the only effective strategy to contain the virus at the moment. As a result, companies face obstacles and find it difficult to respond to this current challenge of remote working. The impact of the novel COVID-19 has created many new challenges, and many of us have had to adopt new ways of working. With the need for accessing to critical applications and the scalability of the infrastructure, cloud computing is emerging as an underlying technology. The cloud technology had a major role in fighting the epidemic; it becomes a salvation for governments and organizations in numerous fields of life, education, health, industry, communication, remote surveillance, and more information. Therefore, this study presents the benefits, characteristics and applications of cloud computing and explains how the cloud contributes to improving life in all regions of the world during COVID-19. It shows that the cloud computing helps countries in combating COVID 19, in education and health sectors, also in the economic and commercial aspects. It investigates the current state by distributing an online questionnaire to various people of academic and non-academic backgrounds in different places over the world in the ICT and education sectors. The results showed that there is an effective role for cloud computing during the epidemic.