The building blocks of digital transformation must enable businesses to be innovative, in order to meet customer expectations and increase adaptability.
This is the new digital economy: where many companies will have to deliver AI-driven automation and deploy new products much faster than ever before.
That means organisations must move away from legacy architecture. But the era of ‘lift and shift’ migrations has not yielded the full benefits of cloud. Now, cloud native development is becoming an essential part of an innovation-optimised digital ecosystem.
Unsurprisingly, more businesses are making the cloud their first choice. Foundry’s Cloud Computing Study 2024 found that 70% of organisations (up from 65% in 2023) now default to the cloud. Furthermore, 65% expected their cloud budgets to increase.1
AWS product leader Rajesh Rathod agrees that the cloud shift is accelerating.
He said: “In the early days, when cloud computing was new, customers were starting with less-critical applications, like their dev/test workloads, or using the cloud as a backup solution. Now we’re seeing customers run their mission-critical workloads on AWS.”2
Cloud native
Simply moving to the cloud, however, does not deliver all the benefits.
Foundry’s research, for example, found that 90% of organisations have faced challenges adopting the cloud. Managing and controlling cloud cost, and worries over long-term expenses, are all cited as obstacles.3
Cloud native technologies overcome many of these drawbacks. They exploit key features of the cloud, including scalability, consumption-based pricing and quick deployment, as well as availability and redundancy.
And modern applications run across multiple clouds, in multiple locations, and match performance (and costs) to workloads at a very granular level.
Cloud native also supports the ongoing trend of “SaaSification”. Customers increasingly want flexible, usage-based payment models which don’t involve large upfront costs or complexity.
“The shift towards cloud-native architectures is driven by the need for rapid innovation and time-to-market,” Ananth Deodhar, Senior Technical Architect at SourceFuse, points out. “People want speed to reach the customer, and speed of deployment. And you can only do that if you are cloud-native, if you are ‘cloud ready’. Cloud-native platforms provide the infrastructure and tools to enable this.”
Businesses who do not adopt this approach risk being left behind. Foundry’s CIO Tech poll found that 28% of organisations in EMEA already use cloud-native technologies such as containers and microservices. Another 44% are researching, or piloting, serverless computing, another cloud native technology.4
Legacy workloads
This does, though, mean moving legacy workloads to the cloud, and replacing end of life applications. This allows organisations to cut overheads from licences for technology such as older databases and servers.
Businesses may well have Windows or SQL Server installations that are 16 or even 20 years old. Rather than paying license fees for older technology, CIOs can move to a flexible cloud platform – such as AWS – and see cost reductions as great as 40%.5
These were the savings achieved when a leading FinTech enterprises in the Southeast US region partnered with SourceFuse, to move to a new application built and powered by a flexible microservices architecture.
The key, however, is to find an application modernisation partner that understands both cloud native, and older Microsoft technologies. For the project to succeed, enterprises need to both migrate, and modernise, all with the minimum of downtimes.
Start your digital transformation journey with SourceFuse.
1Foundry Cloud Computing Study 2024, https://foundryco.com/research/cloud-computing/
2AWS, Year in review 2023: AWS for Microsoft workloads, December 2023, https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/modernizing-with-aws/year-in-review-2023-aws-for-microsoft-workloads/
3Foundry Cloud Computing Study 2024, https://foundryco.com/research/cloud-computing/
4Foundry CIO Tech Poll 2024, https://foundryco.com/research/cio-tech-priorities/
5SourceFuse, Accelerate your transformation with Microsoft workloads in the cloud (eBook)