Following the pandemic that set off in 2020, corporations had to make major changes to their operations. One technological shift that has happened across several industries is the infrastructure adoption of becoming cloud-native. Businesses are implementing such IT solutions to manage their data and applications better while relying on a remote-work model.
Cloud computing is a key enabler of the digital transformation acceleration that came with the Covid-19 era. Nowadays, both large and small-sized enterprises are adopting a cloud-native approach for their software development process.
Companies are now implementing hybrid cloud-native architecture, discovering new applications of 5G, and infusing AI technologies through DevOps, containers, and microservices. Studies show that the majority of companies have adopted hybrid cloud strategies.
With the world adjusting to the “new normal”, businesses are responsible for meeting up to the increasing demand for their applications to be secure, efficient, and dependable. Cloud-native solutions become essential for companies in these areas that legacy application architecture struggles to measure up in the evolving world.
Change in Thinking Process
Before moving operations to the public cloud, companies and their leadership need to change their mindset. The construction procedure for monolithic apps varies from that of cloud-native apps in the methods through which the infrastructure is managed to support developers’ changes.
For a long time, enterprise apps have been built for solving only immediate consumer problems. That kind of thinking has typically inhibited the use of infrastructure sized for heavy workloads, and the monolithic nature of the apps reduced their agility and flexibility to meet up with ever-evolving patterns in the business.
You can develop apps that respond effectively in the event of unexpected changes by implementing cloud-native development. Such applications better adapt with new functionality added in stages, however more reliably and quickly to incur minimal risks.
With cloud-native solutions, companies can speedily and safely experiment with customers’ ideas, products, and services. That way, they can innovate and build impressive new functionalities and stay competitive in an unpredictable world. Businesses can safely achieve this and more at an economical cost rate due to the extensible nature of cloud-native architecture.
Benefits of Adopting a Cloud-Native Approach
You can improve your DevOps with cloud-native solutions as they allow for increased automation of current decision points between IT operations and development teams. Your organisation can create applications and systems that adapt better to the market’s volatility by shifting decisions about provisioning, zero-downtime deployment and scaling into automated tasks.
Simultaneously, adopting a cloud-native approach can help companies save cost otherwise spent managing always-on infrastructure with pay-per-use systems, metered billing and elastic computing. Besides, cloud-based apps also minimise the risk of massive system failures.
Nowadays, cloud-native solutions extend beyond the public cloud’s reaches and can be deployed across hybrid cloud architecture (including private cloud, on-premise data centres and the public cloud).
Enterprises now have the flexibility to transfer separate components of company apps to any infrastructure, whether on or premise, in the event of a change in regulatory policy, service provider’s pricing and/or security posture.
While the world is not in lockdown anymore, the effects of the pandemic are still being endured by organisations. One of such issues to deal with is the increased security risks that come with a remote workforce, and cloud-based technologies like AI help handle them.
With AI apps enabled by cloud-native architecture, they can easily access data irrespective of the location, and implement machine learning capabilities. Plus, fluctuations and variability in data streams are better managed due to the scalability of cloud-native solutions. In the same way, you can deploy several components of a composite AI app with separate dataset requirements as self-contained microservices.
Cloud-native solutions also improve data management and protection to become more dynamic for future innovations. This concept is necessary for companies to understand as they cannot afford to make their applications static since the definition of applications is continuously changing. Another thing implied by the dynamic nature of cloud-native development is the ever-evolving nature of their container capabilities.
Developers in such environments will find it easier to leverage the capabilities that can be enabled on the platform. While self-servicing is an outstanding benefit of the environment, the overlap it creates between developers and IT can leave some work undone if each party assumes that the other has handled it.
However, companies can anticipate such occurrences and prevent them by enforcing a policy engine that combines the implementation of IT policies, particularly for cloud-native applications.
Summary
With the pandemic, the business world faced the challenge of maintaining and improving customer and employee satisfaction by implementing new technology. This is especially true as many organisations had to switch their operations to a remote-work model.
Cloud-native development has transformed the way we implement business plans in this pandemic era. Companies are looking to ensure that their applications are secure, efficient and reliable which is what cloud-native applications bring to the table. Cloud-native apps are secure, cost-effective and highly scalable as new functionalities and features can be included in applications easily.