Cloud-Native is the Future: Are You Ready to Harness its Power and Remain Competitive?

In today’s digital-first world, to meet the evolving expectations of the customer, you need to deliver innovative solutions faster than ever before.

Through technology investment, businesses are expecting optimized operational efficiency, boosted sales and marketing effectiveness, and improved customer retention. As a part of the next decade of innovation, businesses are looking to employ leading-edge technologies to enhance employee productivity, accelerate product innovation, and grow the customer base.

To some extent, public cloud platforms have addressed these expectations, but considering the dynamic demands of the end customers, businesses need to accelerate their ‘Innovation-to-Production (I2P)’ lifecycle. Public cloud in its traditional avatar can help in reducing costs and accelerating innovation to get started. Beyond the cost and agility, organizations also need to deliver superior experiences to internal and external users. To get full advantage of the cloud for an accelerated ‘Innovation-to-Production’ lifecycle in a cost-effective way, becoming cloud-native is the answer.

Over the years, the cloud has been propelling digital transformation in companies of all sizes. According to an annual survey conducted by Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the cloud-native paradigm became the new normal in 2022.

Going by the survey, nearly 2,000 respondents across 6 continents confirmed their alignment and investments toward the cloud-native paradigm. While 44% of respondents confirmed that they are already using containers for almost all applications and business segments, 30% of respondents’ organizations are building business systems by following cloud-native approaches across development and deployment. Organizations that have been quick to adopt the cloud-native approach have been able to reap early benefits and establish a strong foothold in the market. Building a cloud-native future has become an urgent priority and can no longer be considered an afterthought. 

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Cloud-Native: A paradigm shift

In recent times, cloud-native has brought forth a paradigm shift in how we build, modernize and run loosely coupled applications in a resilient, manageable, and observable manner. At the core of it, cloud-native is the concept of developing and running applications by leveraging distributed computing offered by cloud delivery models.

Such applications are designed for the cloud, rather than being built for the cloud. Microservices, service meshes, declarative APIs, containers, and DevOps are core components of cloud-native applications that enable application deployment anywhere, including on-premise servers, public clouds, or hybrid clouds.

With agile development becoming common, the two-pizza team concept has gained massive popularity in cloud-native development programs. These smaller-sized teams of eight to ten members operating as agile PODs are better at collaborating and moving faster to develop and deploy modular applications.

Top cloud-native trends to watch in 2023 and beyond

To remain competitive and unlock the full potential of cloud investments, businesses need to watch for trends in the cloud-native world and embrace them in a systematic way

Here are some of the key trends that are redefining the cloud-native ecosystem:

• Public Cloud Platforms

With cloud-native applications developed and deployed on public cloud platforms, businesses are able to leverage the scalability and automation of agile development frameworks, optimize costs, and increase their velocity significantly. The speed and agility that the cloud offers will help businesses meet customer expectations both in terms of performance and ease of use. Microsoft Azure cloud-native capabilities across containers, data, AI-ML, and other advanced features, make it the ‘de facto platform’ for cloud-native initiatives. 

• Use of Kubernetes

Open-source tools such as Kubernetes are becoming the operating system of the cloud. They are being increasingly used to deploy and manage cloud-native applications on any infrastructure, including on-premise, public cloud, or hybrid cloud. Managed Kubernetes clusters and dev/ops ecosystems such as Microsoft AKS are powering organizations to accelerate cloud-native application deliveries.

• Serverless computing

With developers looking to simplify their development and deployment process, they are making the switch to serverless architecture—a cloud-native app development approach that lets you build and run applications without having to manage or provision servers. A serverless solution from Microsoft—Azure Functions, requires developers to focus only on the business logic without worrying about the infrastructure and, in turn, enabling them to save on overall costs. 

• AI/ML adoption takes center stage

Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML) solutions are helping organizations become future-ready and drive more value from the cloud. There is also a paramount increase in AI adoption with Mckinsey reporting that two-thirds of companies are planning to invest more in AI. Furthermore, the integrated capabilities of AI combined with the ease of modular technology assets can help businesses build and deploy in an agile manner. This boom in AI adoption and the growing popularity of AI tools like ChatGPT will further drive cloud growth in 2023 and beyond. Additionally, the partnership between NVIDIA and Microsoft Azure is expected to bring massive AI capabilities integrated with the scalable Azure cloud in the near future. 

• Data and analytics

With the widespread adoption of IoT and sensors across multiple businesses—data and analytics will gain importance as developers look to analyze the growing volumes of real-time data as well as the data stored in the cloud. AI and ML will also be leveraged to identify patterns and improve algorithmic performance across different industries and business use cases. 

Why is cloud-native the future?

According to Forrester, cloud-native will gain more investments in 2023 with nearly 40% of firms globally gearing up to take a cloud-native-first strategy.

As technological innovations are rewriting consumer culture, there is a significant rise in seismic changes in the global business landscape. You need to leverage a cloud-native approach to meet dynamic customer expectations and be on par with the agile innovation and scale that customers need.

The time has come for technology leaders globally to double down on cloud-native investments. As you get the approvals to increase your spends on cloud-native technologies—you need to gear up to control cloud costs, remain on a budget, and show ROI at the board level. Along with offering greater flexibility and cost-effective solutions, you will also be able to ensure resilience with built-in redundancy and failover capabilities that will meet customer expectations surrounding the overall experience with a brand in the digital marketplace.

3-step process to align with a cloud-native future

For businesses that are looking to get started with their cloud-native adoption journey—here are three steps that will help you maneuver the complex landscapes of the business and tap into the new possibilities of cloud-native applications.

1. Cultural shift:

To maximize an organization’s cloud investment and meet future business needs, organizations must approach their journey in a thoughtful and strategic cloud-native way. There is a need to bring about a fundamental change in how we think about building and operating loosely coupled modular digital applications. There must be a greater focus on agility, openness within the organization, and an emphasis on automation as well as continuous improvement models. 

1. As-is assessment and to-be state definition:

A systematic and prioritized assessment of business-critical ecosystems and workloads, along with an overview of the organization’s future state including the incremental modernization for cloud-native applications—is a must. The assessment should be a guide to define the strategy and the roadmap required to strategically invest in this paradigm shift, which will eventually result in a meaningful ROI.

1. Cross-functional team:

For the smooth adoption of a cloud-native approach, organizations need to navigate major changes and adjust IT dynamics. Establishing cross-functional teams that are composed of individuals with diverse expertise to collaborate and solve problems faster would be ideal than sticking to siloed teams.

Act now and thrive in the age of disruption

The era of cloud-native transformation is here. If you’re looking to stay relevant—you need to act fast. Cloud-native has topped the charts as a vital approach to accelerate digital transformation initiatives. To succeed, businesses need to embrace a top-down culture to adopt cloud-native strategies and iteratively mature the execution plans.

In all this, putting a task force in place and engaging with niche technology partners is key to reaping the greatest rewards.
Talk to our experts to know how you can navigate the cloud-native ecosystems and enable new domains of innovation for your business.