For any organization to run and grow either organically or even seamlessly merge/ acquire with another entity and continue promoting growth, digital transformation plays a vital role. Regardless of the industry, to reach your customer base with maximum potential, you need to have the digital means that can be personalized based on individual customers, geographical or demographic distributions.
Elasticity-
– For organizations to excel at that, there has to be a plan for infrastructure, data centers, and scalable digital platforms so they don’t become bottlenecked under extremely high traffic volumes. At the same time, there needs to be a balance on how much we are investing to set up these infrastructure boxes, so that not too much is spent to do too little.
What if your industry has a high volume of traffic during one time of year and a low volume during other parts of year? These are the ideal use cases where industries prefer an “elastic” infrastructure which can scale up or down based on business needs.
This raises an important factor to consider when enterprise-level architecture for any organization is being planned. A move into cloud computing, therefore, seems to be picking up a lot of popularity where organizations can leverage the flexible infrastructure features.
1. You can choose to increase or decrease the number of servers needed in the cluster to handle the amount of traffic. This way, you don’t need to spend too much on infrastructure upfront.
2. The cloud vendor can provide automatic software upgrades, patching etc. for a certain price.
3. Some basic security measures can be off-loaded to the cloud provider and even a private cloud network can be set up (still keeping the concept of intranet for the organization in cloud)
Disaster Recovery-
Along the same lines, we need to assess whether good disaster recovery techniques have been established. Since it tends to be a non-functional requirement on the enterprise architecture level, at times companies would tend to deprioritize these disaster-recovery projects since the direct cost-benefit metrics may be hard to realize immediately. Nevertheless it is critical to have one.
Because cloud computing leverages the principles of network and device virtualization, it is much easier to set up a copy of the current infrastructure compared to physical data centers and infrastructure. We can use the virtualization technique to put together the entire system, including operating systems, virtual appliances , data stores and all VMs into one software bundle and simply replicate it onto multiple places (creating copies) within minutes to hours, thereby reducing the cost significantly, all for one subscription fees.
Some leading market players are already making strides into this space, with their integration platform-as-a-service offering to integrate multiple systems like ERP, CRM, Middleware ESB as well as providing the ability to write client-facing façade services like APIs. MuleSoft is an excellent candidate to consider for integration, which could become a single platform for integration and cloud computing.
If you are not already leveraging cloud computing for all these benefits, you may be spending either too much time or using too many resources to maintain your infrastructure. The next decade in digital evolution is going to be all about collecting data in orders of zettabytes, and if we are not already leveraging cloud computing to increase the speed, reliability and simplicity of systems, we may be too slow!
