Digital transformation efforts continue to take shape, especially as organizations reel under the pressure to grow their AI adoption. However, implementing a handful of
modern tools cannot result in a successful (or sustained) transformation.
Cloud-native solutions have become even more crucial for enterprise CIOs delivering organizational performance, speed, agility, and resilience. These solutions are now key to building scalable, flexible, and resilient applications that adapt to changing market and customer needs – and enterprise technology experts recognize as much.
Read to uncover the benefits and best practices for building and using cloud-native solutions.

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The Challenges of Going Digital

Every company today wants to be a digital-first company. But this is easier said than done. Legacy applications linger on in most enterprises, and this causes several hurdles; let’s look at how these systems hinder digital transformation success:

• Rigid on-premises applications have undergone several customizations over the years. This makes their infrastructure extremely complex, demanding substantial daily maintenance time, effort, and cost.
• Legacy systems are often built using proprietary technologies and programming languages that are no longer supported and whose skill sets are no longer available.
• Poor integration capabilities lead to several silos, restricting enterprise-wide collaboration and data sharing.
• Many legacy systems lack the security guardrails to safeguard themselves under modern-day attack vectors.
• Updating or modernizing legacy systems is time-consuming and often not possible, slowing down the pace of innovation.
• Outdated monolithic infrastructure cannot recover from outages or system failures, which impact user experiences.

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Understanding the Cloud-native Approach

Cloud-native is an approach to building, deploying, and managing modern applications in cloud computing environments. In contrast to rigid, on-premises applications that are difficult to maintain and scale, cloud-native solutions can quickly adapt to meet emerging demands.

Unlike monolithic architectures that drain developer productivity and deployment velocity, cloud-native applications streamline development and testing. By breaking large applications into smaller components, cloud-native solutions make adding new features easier. They also boost system reliability and availability while accelerating time-to-market.

Cloud-native platforms facilitate scalability and security by increasing software uptime and reducing deployment failure rates. These platforms also reduce the costs of
developing and deploying new features, leading to substantial operational savings.

• Companies can tweak existing features or introduce new ones using concepts like microservices and AI-enabled insights.
• Agile and DevOps practices allow continuous integration, delivery, and responsiveness.
• Cloud-native solutions eliminate costly investments in procurement and maintenance of physical infrastructure, leading to long-term operational savings.
• Organizations can minimize downtime and ensure positive customer experiences by building highly resilient and available applications.

Cloud-native Best Practices

Cloud-native solutions allow companies to make fast and frequent application changes without impacting performance or quality. Since cloud-native architectures decompose components into loosely coupled services, they reduce complexity, simplify management, and improve software delivery speed, agility, and scale.  
To make the most of cloud-native solutions, here are some tips and best practices to keep in mind:

• Move to a microservices architecture: Microservices are the heart of cloud-native applications. Organizing applications into loosely coupled service elements simplifies development, deployment, and scaling. It is also essential to build these services for failure, mainly as the monolith system gets distributed with multiple points of failure.
• Embrace APIs: Enabling communication between various components using APIs is a great way to ensure multiple microservices components interact. The right APIs can quickly transfer data between services and applications while improving developer experience and unlocking innovation.
• Build effective CI/CD pipelines: Effective CI/CD pipelines are critical when refactoring a monolithic application into a cloud-native one. Automated build and test workflows can provide fast feedback to developers, ensuring new changes are regularly integrated into the code base.
• Ensure Cloud-Native Security and Compliance: Implementing comprehensive, cloud-native security and compliance frameworks is necessary to protect data and maintain regulatory standards. Azure, for example, offers several security capabilities, such as security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) for robust attack detection, threat visibility, and threat response.
• Enable AI-driven insights: Embedding AI into the cloud-native strategy can open doors to several benefits. For instance, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) can streamline resource management by predicting and using only resources needed to meet demand, thus minimizing waste and optimizing costs. Similarly, it can help developers predict potential bottlenecks and adjust workflows for maximum efficiency.

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A Real-world Example

An organization faced significant challenges in bringing its digital transformation vision to life. Rigid legacy systems caused several operational issues, including difficulties in scaling development and integration bottlenecks that hindered innovation.

Utilizing cloud-native strategies, microservices architecture, and AI-driven insights, the organization achieved remarkable results:

• Accelerated Deployments: Reduced cycle times from weeks to hours.
• Effortless Scaling: Seamlessly handled a 5x surge in user traffic.
• More intelligent Decision-making: Enhanced with real-time AI-powered analytics.

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Scale Innovation with Cloud-native

Tackling foundational challenges with innovative cloud-native solutions and microservices can accelerate digital transformation initiatives. However, cloud-native app development is just the first step for optimized cloud innovation. Companies must also have a mechanism in place to optimize and scale their cloud-native environment to continually deliver performance, availability, scale, and speed. From cloud infrastructure management to daily operational management, they truly need flexible, expert-managed services that drive optimization and unlock new possibilities.

Parkar offers a range of cloud-native solutions to optimize cloud-native ecosystems. Using a robust AIOps platform and our managed cloud services, we can transform your cloud-native journey into one of growth and innovation.

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