Hard times, but the cloud's all blue sky.

Rough economic times, but cloud computing does relatively well.

Companies across essentially all sectors are feeling the effects of the pandemic, and neither the cybersecurity nor the larger tech sectors are immune. Venture Beat has some crowdsourced charts from Candor that offer an overview of how COVID-19 is affecting employment, including both hiring freezes and layoffs.

One area that's so far performing well, according to the Wall Street Journal, is cloud computing. In general the cloud has held up well, and cloud providers are emerging as "the few corporate winners" during the crisis. The Journal quotes Matthew Prince, Cloudflare CEO, to the effect that, “If we think of the cloud as utility, it’s hard to imagine any other public utility that could sustain a 50% increase in utilization—whether that’s electric or water or sewage system—and not fall over. The fact that the cloud is holding up as well as it has is one of the real bright spots of this crisis.”

Cyber companies offer free or discounted services during the pandemic.

Various cybersecurity companies continue to offer services for free, or at sharply discounted rates. ComputerWeekly has a rundown of some of the recent offers. One timely and notable instance of expertise applied to direct aid of pandemic relief efforts comes from our partners at CenturyLink, who donated and installed high-speed connectivity for the hospital ship USNS Mercy, now on station in Los Angeles to provide the region with increased emergency medical capacity.

Good news on a patient.

We're happy to report some good news about Exabeam's Chris Tillett, an early COVID-19 patient who had a severe case of the virus. He's now out of his medically induced coma, back with his family, and on the way to recovery. May he continue to do well, and may all those similarly afflicted and their families receive healing and comfort.

Exhausted dog syndrome.

Finally, a new social phenomenon emerges as people stay home during the COVID-19 outbreak: EDS, or Exhausted Dog Syndrome, observed as people take their dogs for many more walks than usual, just so the people can get out of the house. There's a lot of up-and-at-'em-pooch, particularly in the teleworking tech sector.