With the rapid adoption of technology and increased customer expectations, businesses are heading toward adopting digital solutions that ensure real-time and insightful data.
The cloud is more than an efficient storage solution—it’s a unique platform for generating data and innovative solutions to leverage that data. Therefore, companies are focusing on holistic approaches empowered by innovation for business continuity amid unforeseen downtimes.
There are many reasons, including IT modernization, cost savings, business agility, and innovation behind the rise of cloud computing in recent years. Cloud solutions allow you to create new products quickly while keeping budgets under control and meeting all evolving business needs.
This blog will delve into the upcoming trends and CIO’s priorities in cloud adoption.
1. DevSecOps:
Application security is always a challenge for businesses, no matter how much technology evolves. That’s why tech leaders are starting to build security into the development process from the start, instead of treating it as an afterthought.
Here comes the savior, DevSecOps – a practice that incorporates security testing into every stage of software development. DevSecOps brings developers, security experts, and operations teams together to build secure and efficient applications.
DevSecOps with Cloud can help SMBs in several ways. It can:
- Reduce complexity: DevSecOps can help to simplify the development process by automating many of the tasks involved in security testing.
- Avoid silos: DevSecOps can help to break down silos between different teams by promoting collaboration and communication.
- Increase collaboration: DevSecOps can help to improve collaboration between developers, security experts, and operations teams by giving them all access to the same information.
- Decrease hands-on work: DevSecOps can help reduce the amount of manual work required for security testing by automating many tasks.
For example, if you’re a startup or SMB with limited IT resources, DevSecOps can help you reduce the amount of manual work required for security testing. This can free up your team to focus on innovation and developing new applications.
Silos can also be a problem for startups and small businesses. As they grow, silos can become roadblocks, and teams can lose visibility into what’s happening. DevSecOps integrated with Cloud can help to break down silos and improve visibility, collaboration, and productivity.
Overall, DevSecOps is a powerful practice that can help SMBs improve the security of their applications and reduce the time and resources required for security testing.
How can SMBs adopt DevSecOps?
Here is the 4-step process you can incorporate DevSecOps in your application development.
1. Shift left security:
Include security checks early in the SDLC rather than at the end of the release cycle. It improves the application’s security at every phase.
2. Integrate tools in the CI/CD pipeline:
Integration with the CI/CD pipeline ensures that security checks are not bypassed and are executed for every build. This improves the application’s quality.
3. Follow DevOps principles:
Follow DevOps and shift-left strategies to automate as much as possible and test applications against desired security standards.
4. Optimize tool usage:
Create custom-enhanced rule sets for tools and plan incremental scans to reduce the time for full scans. Also, leverage the power of AI to reduce the time spent on error analysis reported from tools.
2. Modernizing core apps
In today’s digital world, a cloud-first approach has become a fundamental strategy to reinvent and reimagine an organization’s functionality to keep up with rapidly changing market conditions.
Therefore, it’s essential to have a foundational strategy for successful core legacy application modernization. This analysis should include:
1. Evaluation of the app’s technical characteristics
2. Its suitability for a cloud migration or similar shift
3. ROI of modernization and
4. Interdependencies with other systems
. Here are three main reasons why you should modernize your core apps:
1. More agility:
Applications developed over the years will become rigid and face resource shortages to maintain them. That’s why choosing refactoring and rearchitecting strategies can help extend an application’s functionality and support cloud migration & digital transformation.
2. Better experience:
Older applications often struggle with bad user experience and engagement. Refactoring or rehosting legacy applications can help in addressing user experience challenges. For example, building new user interfaces, mobile apps, or APIs can provide faster response times, resiliency, and more.
In today’s market, you can adopt low-code platforms to build a few operation-specific applications that boost productivity and scalability.
3. Reduced costs:
Classic commercial software offerings come with license costs, which become expensive for startups and SMBs. On the other hand, replacing non-critical legacy applications with SaaS offerings can help reduce maintenance costs and provide extended support.
Another critical strategy for app modernization for SMBs is to develop a long-term modernization roadmap rather than all at once. Core legacy app modernization helps organizations optimize existing applications for distributed Cloud computing platforms rather than requiring them to rebuild from scratch.
Get access to our application modernization strategy whitepaper that can help you ease the modernization journey.
3. Multi-cloud architecture
Modernizing and moving applications to the Cloud is a strategic move to stay competitive and accelerate growth. However, relying on a single vendor could lead to numerous challenges, including vendor lock-in, inflexibility, and security vulnerabilities.
Considering the pros and cons of public and private architectures, growing businesses can adopt Multi-cloud architecture to meet the evolving business needs.
According to a Gartner report, 91% of organizations will use a multi-cloud strategy by 2025.
One of the biggest benefits of a multi-cloud environment is that you can achieve higher levels of uptime & resiliency by replicating applications and data across multiple cloud platforms, thus providing customers with faster access and better load-balancing. On the other hand, the private cloud model can be used to store your mission-critical data.
If you are a retail business, you can use a multi-architecture to run an e-commerce business using different cloud providers for each region. This allows better availability, quick loading time, and better customer experience.
Multicloud reduces unplanned downtimes or outages since it reduces the risk of a single point of failure. An outage in one cloud won’t necessarily impact services in other clouds, and if your cloud goes down, your computing needs will be routed to another cloud (aka load balancing) to ensure seamless operations.
Multi-cloud enables you to leverage new technologies as they emerge to improve your offerings without being limited to the choice offered by a single cloud provider.
4. AI and ML
Cloud computing, AI, and ML are rapidly evolving technologies of our time. The combination of these technologies is propelling businesses forward in multiple ways beyond IT. Rather than looking at these technologies as different entities, enterprise leaders should strive to understand how the rapidly expanding technologies can contribute and spur ever-greater innovation.
AI is all about leveraging and streamlining data from different sources, and Cloud computing can hold significant quantities of data. Therefore, integrating AI into the Cloud can make organizations more intelligent and manage available data to deliver an intuitive experience.
A Deloitte study found that 70% of companies get their AI capabilities through cloud-based software, while 65% create AI applications using cloud services.
Alexa and Siri are the best examples of the perfect convergence of AI and Cloud computing in delivering more personalized and intuitive customer experiences from search to play and purchase.
If you are a startup or an SME, you do not need to build and manage a separate infrastructure for hosting AI platforms. You can leverage Public Cloud services with readymade configurations and models to test and deploy AI applications.
For example, if you are into a retail business, AI-powered Cloud platforms help in:
1. Delivering seamless customer experience with no downtimes around the clock.
2. AI algorithms can predict demand patterns and optimize inventory management. This helps retailers maintain the right stock levels, reducing overstocking and understocking issues.
3. AI can identify unusual transaction patterns and detect potential fraudulent activities, protecting both customers and the retailer from financial losses.
4. AI can forecast trends, sales patterns, and customer behavior, helping retailers make data-driven decisions. This includes predicting which products will be popular in the upcoming season or identifying emerging market trends.
5. Edge computing
Amid the growing number of IoT-connected devices, the need for faster and error-free computation is inevitable. IoT, AI, and ML technologies require high computational capabilities to process large chunks of data. Failing to meet the evolving needs could result in latency, bandwidth, and security issues.
Edge computing is a distributed computing paradigm that brings computation and data storage closer to the end-user. This can improve latency, bandwidth utilization, and overall performance. Edge computing is becoming increasingly popular as the amount of data generated by connected devices continues to grow.
For example, Edge computing is used to collect and analyze data from sensors in smart cities. This can help cities to improve traffic management, energy efficiency, and public safety.
When it comes to the cost, adopting Edge Computing is a bit expensive. However, SMEs can start by deploying edge computing for a few critical applications. This will help them propel towards transformation while controlling CapEx.
6. Serverless architectures
Managing and operating servers or complex runtime environments is still a challenge for enterprises that do not have large or dedicated application teams.
Serverless computing, often called Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), is a cloud execution model. Here, a cloud provider handles all the server-related tasks like provisioning, maintenance, and resource allocation. Developers only need to write code for their specific business logic.
In this model, serverless functions are triggered by events, so they run only when needed, and users are billed solely for the compute time during execution. This can significantly reduce a flat monthly fee for maintaining a physical or virtual server.
When can you use it?
Serverless computing is definitely a game-changer for web applications with fluctuating traffic patterns. Traditional hosting models require predicting and provisioning resources to accommodate peak loads, leading to over-provisioning during idle times and potentially skyrocketing costs during traffic spikes. In contrast, serverless architecture adapts dynamically to the application’s real-time demands, ensuring both smooth performance and cost control.
When traffic surges, additional instances of serverless functions will be allocated instantly to handle incoming requests. Conversely, during idle periods, excess resources are de-provisioned, reducing costs to a minimum.
This agility and cost-efficiency make serverless architecture a more prominent choice for modern web applications, especially those with unpredictable workloads, ultimately enhancing the user experience and the bottom line.
Above all, Serverless architecture enables developers to code in any language or framework of choice – Java, Python, JavaScript, or Node.js. This versatility empowers developers to work in an environment that aligns with their skills and preferences, fostering productivity and efficiency.
The serverless computing market is expected to register a healthy CAGR of over 23.17% during the forecast period (2021 – 2026).
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7. Kubernetes and Containers
As cloud computing moves from simple to complex architectures, it’s essential to develop infrastructure-independent, scalable, and resilient applications that facilitate quicker development cycles, enabling businesses to bring products and services to market faster.
Containerization is such a modern approach that helps businesses develop infrastructure-independent applications with cloud-native features. In this approach, developers use containerization to deploy applications in multiple environments without rewriting the program code.
Perhaps most importantly, containerization allows applications to be “written once and run anywhere“. This portability accelerates development, prevents cloud vendor lock-in, and offers other significant benefits such as fault isolation, ease of management, and simplified security. Lift and Shift and Refactoring strategies can provide a secure and decoupled way to scale up services quickly.
On the other hand, Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating containerized applications’ deployment, scaling, and management. Kubernetes creates a layer of abstraction over the cloud infrastructure, allowing applications to work with Kubernetes instead of proprietary container management technologies.
Containers and Kubernetes enable developers to build and deploy applications that can run on any cloud provider, on-premises, or hybrid cloud environment, without changing the code or configuration. They also enable operators to monitor and troubleshoot applications more efficiently and optimize resource utilization.
Use case:
DevOps teams can now develop, test, and automate applications in isolated and consistent environments, providing continuous integration while experiencing no downtime during the application and software deployment.
Though the Kubernetes can be a viable solution for startups and SMEs, it may encounter a few challenges, including complexity, skills, and cost. Yet, you can adopt Kubernetes by starting small for a few non-critical applications.
Conclusion:
In this era of rapid technological advancement and soaring customer expectations, businesses must embrace digital solutions that offer real-time insights.
Cloud adoption is fueled by various factors, from IT modernization to cost savings, business agility, and innovation. The cloud empowers organizations to create new products swiftly, all while adhering to budgets and meeting evolving business needs. DevSecOps, serverless architecture, AI and ML, multi-cloud, edge computing, Kubernetes, and core app modernization are the cornerstone technologies in cloud computing.
Incorporating these trends isn’t just a choice; it’s a necessity. Organizations that embark on these opportunities will thrive in the dynamic digital landscape, offering superior experiences that drive growth and customer loyalty.
If you would like to harness these technologies and unlock growth and new opportunities, let’s connect and discuss which suits you the best.
Author: Venkat Bonam
Director – Global Delivery
Driving innovation and leading high-performance teams to create impactful digital solutions that drive business growth and exceed customer expectations.
