By Sandeep Bhargava, Managing Director, Asia Pacific / Japan, Rackspace Technology
Indian enterprises are always at the forefront of adopting new technologies to stay ahead of their competition. Enterprises of all sizes are eyeing cloud native applications that can enable faster software development, along with scalability and improved margins. The decision-makers of large and small organizations are upping their efforts to adopt cloud-native and utilise cloud computing to its fullest. Gartner predicts that adoption of cloud native applications and infrastructure will drive future growth and by 2022, more than 75% of global organisations will be running containerised applications in production. Amidst the COVID-19 outbreak, IT leaders across the globe have had to address the need of the hour – how to ensure business agility and sustainability. Business agility has always been a determining factor in tackling the immediate challenges of an unforeseen event and adapting
quickly to rapidly changing market conditions. It acts as a key enabler for businesses to sustain their operations and achieve competitive gains. The cloud has been central to achieving this agility.
Many companies that had already started making the shift towards public cloud were pleased they could take advantage of the ability to quickly scale down and up as required to support their business needs in real time. As stated by IDC in a report, more than 60% of the Indian organizations plan to leverage the cloud as a platform for digital innovation as a result of COVID-19.
Cloud Native processes include building and operating applications on the cloud, using containers, microservices, orchestration, and infrastructure that is used as a code. In India, cloud infrastructure has seen substantial growth in recent years. According to the latest forecast from Gartner, In 2021, spending on managed services and cloud infrastructure will make up 8% of total IT spending in India. The report also forecast that end-user spending on public cloud services in India would total $4.1 billion in 2021, an increase of 29.4% from 2020.
Innovation unleashed
The pandemic has quickened and influenced the decision of many organisations to migrate to the cloud. Because of this move, businesses worldwide have perceived the real value offered by cloud flexibility and agility – innovation. This means using the cloud to transform the IT landscape and processes to support the adoption of emerging innovations – like the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning – and the capability to use automation to set up self-healing, auto-scaling applications, which are not bound by severe limitations. This in turn enables intelligent scaling that helps balance the infrastructure resources against demand. Innovation was the prime driving force for Aramex, a leading global provider of comprehensive logistics and transportation solutions. Whilst the team had innovation and self-development as a top priority, everything was built on premise and that resulted in an environment – with its interdependencies and legacy core products – which prevented them from being as responsive to changing consumer trends.
Cloud native processes are essential components towards driving efficiency and productivity improvements. For instance, teams might discover new ways of improving outdated, inefficient, and manual processes. This not only can increase employee and customer satisfaction but is integral to developing a more agile product development process and accelerating releases. It was an important factor in Aramex’s decisions as part of its migration to AWS to make sure that all its cloud applications were native to the cloud environment, rather than simply “lift and shift” legacy products into the cloud. Aramex and Rackspace Technology are now developing a new cloud-based architecture that will be reusable across more than 60 applications. Companies are
clearly seeing the value of cloud native tools and processes. Companies are clearly seeing the value of cloud native tools and processes. Our research found that nearly all the IT leaders we surveyed were either actively using cloud native tools and processes (51%) or considering adopting them in their organisation (47%).
Opportunities not obstructions
There are occasions however when IT teams are better skilled at legacy technologies or different models, which often leads to a skills gap, preventing an organisation from shifting to the cloud as up- or re-skilling is considered a drain on budgets. This should not be perceived as an insurmountable hurdle for organisations for whom the skills required to make the migrations from legacy to cloud platforms, then optimise and manage them, seem completely out of reach. Professional services consultants can provide hands-on support for migrations and solution implementations as well as work with internal teams to coach them on new practices, and support in fostering the wider cultural shift needed to move towards the new ways of managing IT.
Not all organisations will be ready or want to make the shift towards becoming wholly cloud native. But understanding the approach and the potential benefits it brings will be advantageous to all IT leaders when creating a cloud environment that needs to serve the business today and in the future. Because whether you are taking the plunge or adopting selected elements into your hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, the value that cloud native practices bring to an organisation will only become more critical as agility, innovation and productivity become core to business success and keeping ahead of the competition.
