Cloud technologies support an increasing amount of digital transformation initiatives. While cloud isn’t the ultimate goal of transformation, it provides speed, innovation, and scale to re-imagine business in the digital age. This two-part series reveals the differences between cloud consumers within your company and the benefits of taking a cloud native approach.
Consider Your Audience
“Cloud maturity is a multilane highway. Just as you won’t engage customers via a single marketing channel, you won’t have a single cloud strategy,” states Forrester. Before making any changes, you’ve got to create a plan for implementing cloud solutions.
To develop a unified plan, first think about the needs of primary cloud consumers within your company. These are business leaders, development teams, and leaders in the IT organization – each with a different take on how cloud will help achieve their respective goals:
- Business leaders want to boost customer experience, sales, and customer retention
- Developers want a better way to build new things
- Tech leaders want to improve infrastructure agility
Let’s focus on developers and tech leaders, and explore their perspectives on trends related to new and legacy applications. Determining the right approach for application modernization will depend on your company’s specific needs.
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Cloud Native
With increasing demands from business leaders to modernize, the tech leaders and developers are often looking at this situation in parallel. If your company is focused on building new applications to enhance the customer experience, then your IT organization and development teams need to address a couple of key questions:
- Where do we build?
- What do we do with our data center?
Taking a cloud-native approach accelerates your time to market because it’s faster and easier to build and deploy new applications. Cloud native also simplifies the process of modifying apps and deploying those enhancements and updates to customers.
For example, a financial services organization wanting to modernize its applications might opt to use public cloud platform as a service (PaaS) paired with custom microservices development. PaaS storage, SQL database as a service, and cloud-native logging and monitoring can quickly recreate the business value of the original application, which encourages innovation and enhancements that weren’t previously possible. The application and operations teams also benefit from high availability, autoscale capabilities, integrated monitoring, and end-to-end team ownership of service deployments without impacting the entire solution.
To address the question of your data center, you should think about the future of your company as it pertains to running infrastructure. You can move existing applications and data from your data center to the cloud and gain economic and scalable benefits. Some cloud-native platforms offer the ability to modernize your legacy applications to be more resilient, faster, easier to maintain, and cost effective.
Keep in mind that the subject of modernizing legacy applications is slightly more complex and often leads to conversations around legacy migration and solutions to blend your new innovations with your current state of business.
Stay tuned for part two of this series that further explores legacy migration as an approach for application modernization.