The Change Agent
Competitive advantage is the name of the game. In a marketplace where disruption is constant, enterprises are eager to utilize technology that transforms, modernizes and—if they’re successful—differentiates their brand and offers unique value.
Transforming with the Cloud
COPY1 Organizations that find ways to deliver their services better and faster can uncover new-found agility driven by the efficiencies gained through transformation—like improved value streams, new revenue channels, and time and cost efficiencies. They can use technology to build on their competitiveness in new and innovative ways.
Cloud is one of those transformative technologies. Companies are shifting to the cloud in droves because it is enabling them to compete harder than ever before. Cloud computing is undoubtedly shaping the future of IT—supporting sweeping changes for major tech and business disruptors through its delivery of AI, IoT, RPA and overall digital business transformation.
Applications are the gateway to continuous improvement. Improvement of the products and services delivered to the customer. More frequent, agile software releases are required to stay ahead of the competition. But monolithic, aging systems aren’t built to support the demands of today’s customers whose expectations are rooted in mobility, cutting-edge features, enhanced functionality and remarkable speed.
New application architectures through the cloud offer the prospect of speed and agility. Whether through features, functionality, design, accessibility or something in between, there is always room to improve and modernize applications to transform and digitally enhance the customer journey. Indeed, today’s reality is high-volume, high-competition, and new apps are being created faster than ever before. In fact, according to IDC, 500 million new applications will be created in a five-year span—this is equal to the number built over the past 40 years.2
Organizations are increasingly seeing the value of microservices—the architectural style—for developing new applications and distilling monolithic, legacy applications and systems. These systems are unwieldy and difficult to maintain, manage and quickly scale, not to mention they can become a liability and roadblock to progress.
By 2022, IDC predicts that 90% of all new apps will feature microservices architectures that improve the ability to design, debug, update and leverage third-party code.2
Cloud-native apps can be built as interconnected containers through a service mesh that runs reliably across environments. Compared to monolithic applications, microservice ecosystems are better suited for continuous integration and deployment, enabling better, faster and more dynamic iterating. Complex workloads can be brought into the cloud, then refactored and easily broken down by leveraging microservices running on containers (think Docker and Kubernetes). When microservices are built using a container infrastructure, you can run the environment anywhere with virtually unrestricted processing power.
The benefits—primarily portability, modularity and velocity—are achieved more rapidly. Containerized microservices also improve operations by isolating services that are easy to deploy, identify, monitor and fix in the event something goes wrong.
Nearly 8 in 10 leaders are currently using microservices.12
While it can be easy to glamorize buzzwords surrounding MSAs, their value cannot be overlooked. Although microservices are only one part of the big modernization picture, they enable organizations to improve and optimize their value stream.