BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

Important benefits of cloud-native applications for businesses

Most businesses on their *digital transformation journeys have already migrated or are on the verge of migrating to the cloud. Cloud migration is essentially moving data, applications, and IT processes from on-premise infrastructure to a cloud server.

Cloud migration offers several benefits to businesses such as scalability, resiliency, flexibility, reduced costs, better performance, and more! These benefits are best leveraged with cloud-native apps.

Cloud-native apps are apps developed specifically for cloud computing architecture. These apps are independent services that are packaged in lightweight, portable containers. Cloud-native apps are easily scalable and thus rapid changes can be made based on demand. The containerised app can be isolated and used without any dependency on the underlying infrastructure. Containerised apps can easily be deployed in multiple environments so long as there is a container runtime engine. Since the presence of a physical server is not essential for these apps,  their flexibility increases. Cloud-native apps are the prime movers for digital innovations. These apps are key factors for advanced analytics, chatbots, and mobile apps.

Features of Cloud-native apps

Can be managed independently: Cloud-native apps are developed independent of each other. Hence, they can be deployed and managed individually.

Resilient: These apps can withstand and remain online even in instances of infrastructure outages.

Independent of vendors: These apps are based on open-source and standard-based technology which offers interoperability and workload portability. This prevents vendor lock-ins and enhances portability.

Agile: Cloud-native apps offer flexible deployment options across a network. These apps are easy to build, deploy and incorporate changes in, because they are quite small when compared to traditional apps.

These features facilitate the easy deployment of cloud-native apps for various functions. These apps offer several benefits to businesses using business transformation services.

Benefits of Cloud-native Apps for Businesses:

Make businesses agile

Agility is the need of the hour in a highly dynamic marketplace. Cloud-native apps can be easily developed according to the demands of the business. Besides, these apps foster several iterations that the business may need to perform to adapt to changes in buyer demands or variations in the market dynamics or any other external stimulus. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses that were quick to respond to external changes were the ones that could sustain. Cloud-native apps offer agility to businesses to cope with unprecedented conditions.

Enhance Customer Experiencex

The key to the success of any business is happy customers. Businesses across the globe invest extensively to understand their customers and offer them a personalised experience. Cloud-native apps help address most of the customer pain points. For instance, they minimise time-to-market so that buyers receive the products well in time. Since these apps are easy to iterate, businesses can add new features to cater to the changing needs of the buyer easily in a quick time. This helps offer a customised buying experience.

Can be Integrated into legacy systems

Many business owners are sceptical about migrating to the cloud because of the belief that they will have to discard their existing systems. The good news is that cloud-native apps can be easily integrated into legacy systems. API-based integrations help connect large volumes of enterprise data with user-friendly front-end apps. Integration of cloud-native apps facilitates the extension of legacy systems through the web or mobile apps.

Simple to manage

Cloud-native apps work on serverless platforms. Hence, developers can upload codes in the form of functions on the platform seamlessly. Cloud-native apps relieve software developers of various responsibilities such as provisioning cloud instances, configuring networking, allocating storage, etc., because the serverless platform manages them.

Also, these containerised apps are extremely flexible because they function independent of the underlying infrastructure.

Reduce costs

Cloud-native apps have standardised infrastructure and several options for cloud-native tools like Kubernetes and other open-source tools for managing operations in the cloud. Open-source cloud-native tools minimise costs. In addition, cloud-native apps offer flexible pricing facilities to users. The serverless platforms for containerised apps facilitate running dynamic workloads and pay-per-use compute times.

Are resilient

Cloud-native apps foster microservices architecture and Kubernetes. This helps develop apps that are not only resistant to faults but also have a self-healing feature. Besides, microservices architecture prevents the failure of the entire app in case of an event by isolating the impact of failure. This reduces the downtime of the app.

Offer scalability

Cloud-native apps eliminate hardware dependency. Hence, it is easy to append commodity servers for horizontal scalability instead of adding more processors, storage, and memory to existing servers.

Are Portable

Containers facilitate writing apps that run on a range of devices from mobile phones to mainframes without changing the code. This makes it easy to deploy applications where they are needed.

Final Takeaway

Cloud-native apps prepare organisations for the present day and the future. These apps leverage the advantages offered by platforms and processes that exist on cloud platforms. They are highly scalable, and iterative, and integrate seamlessly with cloud services to enhance their capabilities without the need for extensive coding. Cloud-native apps offer a host of features with the flexibility to add new ones to offer a great user experience.

*For organizations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organizational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organizations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organizations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.