The coronavirus crisis and the resultant lockdowns have seen an explosive rise in gaming usage and work-from-home solutions. Daily connections to our service have spiked (+50%), and so has demand for Shadow, our full-featured cloud PC. These booming numbers can partly be explained by the significant increase in users’ free time. But the strongest factor is probably that gaming (virtually) brings people together.
With WFH, we have noticed that a significant part of the new connections to Shadow are not running games, but rather professional software. In fact, many Shadow users have discovered the power of such streaming solutions, especially when their work requires computing power. If this trend continues, cloud computing technology will play a key role in breaking hardware’s limits and shaping the future of work.
Confinement has put high pressure on Shadow’s technologically optimized infrastructure. Indeed, running a cloud computing service requires one to orchestrate multiple factors, all of which were impacted by the crisis. Working with our partners, adjusting our model quickly and implementing new technological features rapidly, our teams were able to maintain the best experience of Shadow, and ensure continuity of the service.