Risk.net Tech vendors played a key role as markets – and market participants – adjusted to Covid-19 Risk.net montage A year into the Covid-19 pandemic, it is clear that the technology sector has been one of the big beneficiaries of changing consumer and corporate behaviour. That doesn’t mean it’s been easy for tech providers to embrace the opportunity. As an example, take the surge in cloud usage driven by a newly minted army of home-workers: Microsoft saw usage of its Teams videoconferencing and collaboration application skyrocket, as well as its virtual desktop and Xbox Live gaming, creating unprecedented demand for its Azure cloud platform on which these applications operate. In addition, Microsoft had to hive off capacity for organisations providing emergency, medical, research and other pandemic responses.