Businesses are adopting cloud-native technology to drive innovation and resilience in the face of increasing digital disruption. Digital transformation is no longer optional; it is a must for driving development and vital for meeting the demands of overburdened businesses.
As the COVID-19 pandemic forced companies in Europe to go digital, the cloud-native strategy has shown itself to be the best way for tech-savvy businesses to stay ahead of the curve. Recent research that can be seen in full at www.contino.io/insights/top-20-dx-innovators, identified top tech leaders in the continent embracing digital transformation by using cloud-native development strategies.
This article discusses some of the advantages of taking a cloud-first approach and success stories from outstanding innovators.
Benefits of Going Cloud Native
Reduce Product Release Time
Infrastructure management takes up a considerable amount of time and effort for businesses: providing, configuring, and maintaining resources. The conventional division of labour between development teams and IT operations sometimes involves far too many decision points to allow for real-time market responsiveness to make problems worse.
By automating such decision points, organisations may transition to DevOps or even NoOps using cloud-native technologies. Provisioning, continuous integration, scaling, and zero-downtime deployment decisions may all be converted to automated activities, reducing IT operations time even further.
This allows firms to tackle new challenges while automating existing ones. Enterprises can ship products out quicker, enhance innovation, and increase flexibility by maintaining a balance of the ideal personnel, culture, and technology.
Minimized Costs
Reduced expenses. In most businesses, around 80% of the IT budget is spent on just keeping the lights on rather than driving the company ahead. Meanwhile, it’s believed that 30% of data centre capacity remains unused at any given moment.
Cloud-native architecture has capabilities like auto-scaling, metered pricing, and pay-per-use models, allowing businesses to migrate away from expensive always-on infrastructure and put those savings toward new feature design and deployment. Increased durability and decreased downtime can derive from cloud-native infrastructures, resulting in indirect cost savings.
Resources and Procedures for Sophisticated Security
A cloud-native solution is more straightforward to administer than an on-premises system, which requires your team to configure, operate, and expand it. Dashboards are available in cloud-native applications, and they allow you to examine critical information, such as files sent, their sizes, the retention policy applied to them, and so on.
Your IT staff may focus more on profitable and challenging projects with better insight over file delivery and other mundane activities.
Improve Your Customers’ and Clients’ User Experiences
Businesses that do not establish customer-centric models will inevitably lose a competitive advantage in the marketplace. As customers’ expectations have risen, businesses have attempted to raise the bar by offering incremental enhancements and frequent updates to improve their customers’ experiences. Cloud-native apps enable rapid updates and revisions in real-time, giving your company the competitive edge it needs to improve user experience.
Businesses can build and deploy strong and tailored solutions to the demands of their clients via cloud-native software development, ensuring long-term success. Cloud-native software is developed, tested, and delivered on the cloud, resulting in a stable release with less latency, downtime, and technical issues.
Success Stories of Digital Innovators
Gary Delooze
In 2017 when Gary Delooze became the National Building Society’s Chief Information Officer, he broke with the company’s long-standing practice of outsourcing the majority of its IT functions to device suppliers and system integration businesses.
After focusing on developing their in-house capabilities, the team began to depend on their understanding to handle the essential technologies without outside assistance. Around a year ago, they began adopting cloud and simplifying their IT estate for increased efficiency.
Delooze emphasises the importance of incorporating culture into all of their activities. He recommends that other firms employ a step-by-step method to deliver value quickly. As a result of his strategy, Nationwide’s IT capacity is now nearly entirely in-house and they have slashed both costs and lead times. As a result, they will be able to expand their creativity while still providing IT solutions.
He also advises CIOs and tech leaders to pay greater attention to their specialists when determining the ideal course of action for each project.
Debra Bailey
Bailey joined O2 in 2019 and has since guided the firm through many digital transformation projects. O2 was in the midst of a complicated digitalisation process when she arrived, which included launching a new 5G network to replace the company’s primary tech stack. She saw that a transformation project was reliant on multiple IT divisions and far too many contractors involved.
She established a new approach after further examining the transformation process, which includes establishing a new model for in-sourcing digital capabilities and aligning technology with business outcomes. Her company’s new operational strategy prioritises both technology and people. Furthermore, she suggested that employees need to streamline technology delivery to minimise redundancy, avoid gaps, and align business with IT.
Jon Braithwaite
Jon joined Compass Group, the largest food and support services company in the United Kingdom and Ireland, in 2019. His primary role was to focus on building teams and collaborations to offer technology that transforms the experience for both consumers and workers across sectors.
Jon devised a complete cloud system and data strategy that resulted in the digitisation of essential systems, allowing them to convey company activities in a more user-friendly manner while also promoting growth. He built a solid team with skills and expertise to push the business ahead by being outward-looking and inspired by customers to gather vital feedback necessary to embrace digital transformation.
The Bottom Line
Cloud-native allows you to innovate and accomplish more, quicker, in a world where your business needs to adapt quickly to the changing landscape around it. Empower your business to be more flexible, responsive and secure while also giving workers more time to pursue their own ambitions.
