As the COVID-19 outbreak impacts our society, most consumers move to online shopping in higher numbers. As reported by data from ROI Revolution, this pandemic has sped up this behavior from physical to the digital market by approximately five years. The report shows that 90% of consumers prefer home delivery to visit a store, 80% are likely to use digital communications, and only 28% for in-store shopping to increase between August 2020 and February 2021.

This new normal pushes thousands of businesses to take a critical decision about how smart they spin their brains for future profitable growth. In this matter, cloud-based data platforms and data & analytics have a large role to play, from maintaining the market to create the walls of new methods and predict what's next.

It is critical for us since moving the shifting infrastructure from traditional data centers to cloud computing is not easy. We need short, medium, and long-term data-driven plans in place as quickly as possible to help make informed decisions. Here are the three vital data-driven pathways to maximize applying data & analytics for business recovery and continuity plan during the Covid-19 crisis.

Business Recovery 1: The use of the data virtually for a positive outcome

In this COVID-19 crisis, decision-making becomes more challenging for all entrepreneurs, especially where there is a doubt about the prospect. To remain successful, we must hold the data with every aspect of the business by selecting input to prepare maps, models, and estimates.

The data play a vital role in acknowledging the crisis. For example, healthcare providers leverage data of countries affected by the pandemic to forecast the hospital's needs like beds, masks, ventilators, and way more. Secondly, grocery retailers use point-of-sale (POS) data to help merchants recognize and export their customers’ products. Besides, we can use telecommunication operators (Telcos) for data traffic to monitor and manage interface capability, build model capacity, identify obstacles, and expand the network decisions.

Business Recovery 2: Utilizing data & analytics to every point of the crisis problem

It is accurate that many companies are trying to make data & analytics for their new culture and doing business until the following years. Here are three tips for implementing how we can develop a data-driven response to a crisis.

Resilience — improve data platform and control the cloud

Through the quick response, data, and analytics, all entrepreneurs need to review the resilience strategies for their data platform to assure that it arises in the current operating environment. Most importantly, we have to optimize our data platform enormously, where workloads and data volumes have increased. Also, maintenance is essential to know our data's strength and automatize critical tasks, such as database tuning, automated indexes, data distribution, and compression.

In this way, the cloud will play a crucial part if we are looking to scale-up our data and maintain data security and integrity during periods to work remotely. For your reference, a cloud is a powerful tool for allowing the mass of people to enter large capacities of data in real-time. Indeed, we will improve the ease of access and shareability of data and increase agility and flexibility.

Realignment— optimize and modernize the data and support

The application of data & analytics through this point is critically important if we navigate the intermittent streams. Data & analytics allow companies to evaluate multiple business situations. We can manage supply and demand, assess and mitigate supplier risk, adjust for disturbances in services and supply chains, and adapt to visible changes for consumer trust and priorities.

Understanding buyers’ changing patterns is glorious for many industries because the pandemic as new behavior is already visible. For example, Amazon has dramatically increased its fulfillment capacity. In contrast, online grocery marketplaces have had to adapt to considerable increases in fresh vegetable deliveries to meet demand.

Optimizing existing data & analytics processes—such as developing a 360-degree view of the customer or product or consolidating data onto a consistent platform or into a set of processes—can be useful to streamline decision-making.

Recovery— invest tools for agility, scale, performance, and continued outgrowth

When companies move into recovery, more businesses will start to develop their distribution of AI-enabled resolutions to raise income and restore upscale growth. AI and ML produce the capability to examine data from many sources that discover developing trends and predict potential future crashes.

By examining large volumes of data until basic patterns, it enables us to create complicated decisions and human behavior, among many other things. AI-enabled methods also continuously discover and change, which means we can optimize the perception and forecast we produce eventually.

Nowadays, we, as workers and consumers, spend our time online. Consequently, we expect ML and advanced data & analytics to be in place for detecting new consumption patterns and delivering hyper-personalized products and services. We need to ensure the analyzing data at a suitable scale to unlock the real meaning of it and engage with energetic behavior.

Business Recovery 3: Get the maximal outcome of the data & analytics

Controlling the cloud’s versatility is necessary, such as uniting and analyzing data from multiple sources into one cloud-based data platform will allow the numbers to process. This foundation will help businesses answer complex issues smartly in making the change with the following action quickly.

Moreover, this speed is beneficial in such an unpredictable economic opportunity to provide success. Now, it is the chance to push the limits of what's potential with data in every strategy due to this pandemic to ensure our forwardness for future profitable growth.

Conclusions

When we plan for business recovery from an unpredictable situation like COVID-19, it is crucial to learn those three steps, of course, with teamwork to overcome our fears of the possible hazard. However, staying educated with those insightful data-driven actions will help us make rational business resolutions during this irrational time.