Through the pandemic, cloud-native applications and other digital transformation technologies have played a key role in the economy and business resuscitation. As on-premise infrastructure management and disaster recovery became almost impossible with work from home taking shape, cloud offered solutions in the app development arena that quickly transitioned into money-making opportunities. As a result, there is a strong propulsion towards cloud in newer emerging markets, and existing ones are responding to the crisis with a renewed cloud focus. As they do so, they face complexities associated with IT, security risk, operational efficiency and more. Moreover, organizations that are still in the initial phases of moving to the cloud, sometimes neglect nonessential cloud migration details that pose a significant risk moving forward.
In this blog, we will talk about how can organizations adapt to changed cloud-native approach through the pandemic, and what possible future trends in the area will likely see an uptick, and how cloud services companies can help you in channeling the right growth trajectory.
Many of the conversations about cloud computing in the past were about modern infrastructure for quicker innovation, faster time-to-market and cost optimization. However, the pandemic has brought in a number of upgrades into existing cloud markets like flexible computing power, high availability, lower cost for backup and disaster recovery, resilient core for business process and business continuity, legacy skill risk, remote workforce management, safe return to the workplace, and business agility into focus to allow for resilient business functions.
The Mandatory Cloud Shift
Cloud adoption has been gaining significant traction through the pandemic, being the handiest conduit to digitalization. According to an IBM survey, 64 percent of respondents acknowledged a shift to more cloud-based business activities during the pandemic. This can be attributed to the fact that with the cloud-native approach, businesses are inherently building applications that are better at responding to change and uncertainty. It is specifically designed to help enterprises handle unprecedented demand, seamless scaling, service interruptions due to the centralization of data, exhaustive on demand resources, and all this while provisioning inclusion of next-gen tech into a project through various tools and frameworks.
Increased need for a service-based architecture
With the volatility of demand increasing in almost all industries amidst covid, there is a growing need for service-based architecture in the mobile apps backed with an agile framework that can sustain critical service support even when one of the services fails. Consequently, the use of microservices, containers, and DevOps in the app development arena is now reaching the previously untouched markets that are also waking up to the potential of automation and intelligence in their products and services. On the other hand, digitally active enterprises are upgrading their existing infrastructures leveraging the hybrid cloud offerings to become more resilient to recent challenges. This has helped them become better at handling peak workloads, loss of agility, and unexpected changes in business direction or customer patterns.
Increased need for agility
Cloud-native applications also help organizations adapt and respond to CX trends with new features and incremental functionality quickly, reliably, and with less risk. Numerous DevOps tools available with cloud service providers, further help in the automation of existing decision points between development teams and IT operations. By transforming decisions about provisioning, scaling, and zero-downtime deployment into automated tasks, applications, and systems respond better to market dynamics. At the same time, cloud-native is also helping organizations cut down costs amidst the looming recession with elastic computing, on demand billing, as well as pay-per-click.
Dealing with a virtual workforce
With most of the global workforce remote, major public cloud providers witnessed a huge surge in demand for their services. Such volumes stressed traditional infrastructure like VPNs and forced organizations to lift and shift to the cloud quickly, leaving room for further optimization. Social distancing further made it difficult, if not impossible, to access on-premise infrastructure implying a critical infrastructure risk. Therefore, there is a need for a transformed cloud strategy for migration, security, operations, value planning, and DevSecOps (development, security, and operations) as well as a retraction of cloud-native, container, and serverless initiatives.
Being Cloud-smart
Another choice for some leaders could be rather refraining from a “cloud-first” approach, which prioritizes cloud adoption and legacy modernization, and switching to a smart approach, that aligns cloud native with the organization’s unique goals and needs. Organisations need to consolidate a sustainable model for funding to support the investments required to get value from cloud, and craft a novel business-technology model that leverages cloud for speed, efficiency, agility and scalability.
The greatest benefits of cloud accrue to the business from faster time-to-market, simplified innovation, easier scalability, and reduced risk. Cloud platforms can help deploy new digital customer experiences quickly and can support analytics that would be uneconomical or simply impossible with traditional app development with on-premise servers. The businesses must commit to keeping up to date with latest tools and cloud technologies and maintain a culture of continuous learning and cloud app development services can help them do that.