Cloud Hosting

"If you look at SafetyCulture, Culture Amp, and Canva is probably the best example of it, they are all built on the cloud," he said. "A lot of these companies are seeing (the shift to the cloud) accelerate as a result of the coronavirus pandemic."

Meanwhile, Airtree Ventures partner James Cameron pointed to the growth of online cloud computing training provider A Cloud Guru, which reached $116 million in revenue this year, as a good example of how tech startups can make the most of the rush to the cloud.

A Cloud Guru teaches people how to use cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform and has taught two million users since launch in 2015.

"It really has been the right time and right place (for the business) to enjoy that explosive growth," Mr Cameron said.

"They are sitting at this mega trend and of the tailwinds they have got behind them one is online education and the second is the shift into digital reskilling, then there's also the shift in the general software development world to the cloud."

A Cloud Guru co-founder and chief executive Sam Kroonenburg said remote working has been a key catalyst for the shift to the cloud.

A Cloud Guru co-founder and chief executive Sam Kroonenburg. Credit:Eamon Gallagher

"I think the world has a mandate to move to the cloud and this is a major shift that is happening across the world globally," he said. "Companies are wanting to move away from managing their own infrastructure, they want to have the flexibility to send their workforce home and COVID-19 is just accelerating that trend."

Mr Kroonenburg said he expected this shift to continue even after the pandemic is over.

"It is a long term systemic change," he said.

Loading

Paul Bassat, co-founder of Square Peg, said migration to the cloud was one of the key themes the venture capital firm was focused on, pointing to its investments in Israeli data centre infrastructure startup Excelero and cloud storage infrastructure startup Lightfix.

"We are essentially seeing pretty much all businesses are going to move to the cloud, we are 20 to 30 per cent into that journey so there's still a long way to go here," he said.

Read more:
Venture capital firms bank on a sustained shift to the cloud - Brisbane Times