While the coronavirus pandemic continues to press harder on global economy, there are a few businesses that are on the rise. On such sector is cloud computing. With almost all of the world’s working population staying at home to work, there is a massive surge in demand for space. And such is the demand, the a relative underdog in cloud computing, Oracle too seems to have bagged a lucrative contract.
Oracle, who needed a win desperately, now has a chance to prove that it can take up the fight against industry giants like Amazon and Microsoft. The company has won a cloud computing contract with Zoom. The video conferencing app, despite its flaws, controversies, bans and boycotts, continues to rally in terms of user growth. Active users on the platform are up from a paltry 10 million in December 2019 to 300 million now. Up until now, Zoom was relying on its own data center gear and cloud computing services from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure.
However, about 6 weeks ago, the company decided to seek out expert help. This is when Oracle came into play, which is now processing data traffic from “millions” of Zoom users, with about 7 million gigabytes of Zoom data per day is flowing through its servers.
“It’s exciting to be able to come on to a platform and scale very rapidly,” Zoom’s Chief Technology Officer Brendan Ittelson told Reuters in an interview. And while the financials of the deal remain undisclosed, it wasn’t met with a cheer of any sort, in the markets. At the time of publishing, Zoom’s stock was down close to 5% or $8, trading at $156.56.
Zoom has just come out of a 90 day mission to fix its security flaws, after it was discovered that the app could pose serious cyber risk and ‘Zoom bombing’ became a thing. Exposed privacy and security flaws led to several private corporations and governments banning/restricting the app’s usage.
Zoom thus announced a massive security overhaul a few days back, where it launched Zoom 5.0, the fruit of 90 days of extensive labor. The update led to the platform adopting the latest, AES 256-bit GCM encryption standard, as well as giving meeting admins, the ability to choose their data center regions. This is because Zoom was accused of eerily routing some calls from America through Chinese servers.
