COVID-19 – A Catalyst for Enterprises to Embrace Cloud
Written by Harini Krish
Lead Technical Content Writer
As we deal with the COVID-19 disaster, we also need to adopt new ways of working to minimize the impact on business. The businesses that have gone digital stand a better chance of survival than those that haven’t.
In the last few weeks, we have seen a surge in the usage of digital tools. Lots of schools are considering digital medium for teaching, websites such as MathsWatch see a surge in their activity. Dance and music classes are being conducted in Zoom. Shoppers now reluctant to go to the stores are turning to e-commerce for a wider variety of goods. As per one of the reports in NY times, Amazon said it was hiring 100,000 warehouse workers to meet surging demand. Work from home (WFH) has become the way of working for many of the enterprises. As movie theatres closed, digital platforms like Netflix and YouTube are gaining a new audience.
The shift towards digital is massive, and it is the cloud that is powering the ability of online applications to scale reliably and securely. Microsoft said it saw a spike of 775% in demand for its cloud service only for Teams due to the current pandemic situation. There are many such other examples that show how cloud has proven its ability to respond at scale and remain robust.
COVID-19 will be a catalyst for enterprises to embrace the cloud. Businesses need to churn vast amounts of data and drive insights if they want to remain competitive. All this, and more, can only be enabled by enterprises if they build the right capabilities to back their cloud strategy. Building a Cloud-Native application is a priority for almost any organization.
A Cloud-Native application is one that takes full advantage of Cloud characteristics. A Cloud-Native app exploits programmable Cloud infrastructure; leverages the elasticity of the Cloud to scale up and down; is made up of distributed components; is resilient to failure of any component and is deployable across different Cloud providers.
Let’s analyze some of the foundations of native cloud applications, which is enabling this massive shift in software development and deployment.
Agile: Having the ability to fail fast and course-correct allows businesses to react and move fast. Many application development teams are now delivering software incremental in 1- or 2-weeks sprints.
When cloud-native automation tools for continuous integration and continuous delivery are integrated with an agile approach, the business can achieve a faster time to market.
Microservices: Microservices are at the core of cloud-native application architecture. Each microservice is made to execute a different function. Microservices are “loosely coupled,” meaning they operate largely independently. This enables developers to make changes to one microservice or small group of microservices without having to update or otherwise affect the whole application.
Containers: Containers provide a standardized way to package application code with its configuration and dependencies like libraries and binaries. They are portable and can be moved from one computing environment or cloud to another. Their lightweight nature allows them to be instantiated and decommissioned faster, freeing up precious resources from hosts.
Serverless: Serverless computing is a model where the cloud provider runs the server to dynamically manage the allocation of machine resources. The pricing is purely based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application, rather than on pre-purchased units of capacity.
Conclusion
In a period where speed is critical to success, an increasing number of companies, particularly in the retail and consumer-focused industries, are embracing a cloud-native approach for application development and deployment. Cloud-native gives unparalleled business speed, agility, and insight to support companies to identify customer needs early using their data and respond instantly with high-velocity cloud-native application development.
Royal Cyber brings you cloud services that are a game-changer. Royal Cyber can be your partner for your journey into the cloud. We approach the cloud with integrated deployment models and a choice of solutions to drive enterprise transformation and make your business future-ready. We create innovative possibilities that energize business growth. For more information, you can email us at [email protected] or visit www.royalcyber.com
