By Ronald Magondo, Director of Awe-Inspiring Feats

Cloud-native approaches are rapidly redefining the business landscape, enabling forward-thinking businesses to realise new opportunities, deliver digital innovations and unleash their growth potential.

So what is a cloud-native approach and how can it benefit your business?

Today’s rapidly evolving digital ecosystem demands that businesses continuously seek out novel and innovative strategies in order to maintain their competitive edge. One such solution increasingly gaining traction among tech-savvy businesses is the adoption of cloud-native approaches to business operations. These innovative methods, built in the cloud, revolutionise how businesses design, develop, and deploy their applications, enabling greater scalability, flexibility, and efficiency for both teams and customers.

Think of this approach like building with wooden blocks. But each block, or part of an application, can be moved, changed, or replaced without disrupting the entire structure. This means that businesses can adapt quickly, fix problems, and grow their services easily without major disruptions.

Take Amazon as an example of a company that employs a cloud-native approach to managing its vast digital infrastructure. Its web services are built on microservices that can be individually scaled depending on demand. For instance, during a busy shopping event like Black Friday, the company can scale up its payment microservice to handle the increased load, while other services like product recommendations remain unchanged. This flexibility helps the company to serve millions of customers without website crashes or slowdowns.

But working at such a large scale and with so many complex components means that companies also want reassurance that their software will run reliably and consistently, which is why it is important to explore both the benefits and drawbacks of a cloud-native approach to make informed decisions.

Benefits of cloud-native approaches:

• Agility and scalability: Cloud-native approaches enable businesses to scale their infrastructure and resources as required. By leveraging cloud computing services, businesses can easily allocate and reallocate computing power, storage, and bandwidth based on demand.

• Cost-efficiency: Adopting cloud-native approaches can significantly reduce infrastructure costs. Instead of investing in expensive hardware and maintaining on-premises data centres, businesses can leverage the pay-as-you-go model offered by cloud providers, allowing for optimised resource utilisation, streamlined operations and minimising unnecessary expenses.

• Enhanced reliability and resilience: Cloud-native applications leverage cloud infrastructure to ensure high availability and reliability, reducing the risk of downtime and data loss. By utilising technologies such as containers – a specific type of software that essentially holds everything a program needs to run correctly – and microservices, which are a collection of small, independent services, each performing a single function which  can be developed, rolled-out, and scaled without affecting the functioning of other services, businesses can isolate and address issues in specific components, delivering an uninterrupted service.

• Improved time-to-market: Cloud-native approaches enable faster development and implementation. By leveraging containerisation technologies, businesses can package applications along with their dependencies and easily deploy them across different environments. Furthermore, the flexibility and streamlined process of cloud-native approaches reduces time-to-market, enabling businesses to launch new features, and to respond swiftly to market changes and customer demands, maintaining a competitive edge in the market.

The drawbacks of cloud-native approaches:

• Complexity: Embracing cloud-native approaches demands expertise in containerisation, orchestration, and managing distributed systems, which can be overwhelming for businesses.

• Vendor lock-in: While cloud providers offer remarkable services and tools, businesses must be considerate of potential vendor lock-in. Moving applications and infrastructure to a cloud provider's ecosystem can create dependencies that are challenging to migrate away from in the future, and so they need to carefully evaluate the portability and compatibility of these solutions.

• Security and Compliance: The distributed nature of cloud-native architectures means that businesses must invest in robust security measures and in ensuring the protection of data.

I firmly believe that embracing cloud-native approaches is essential for companies seeking growth and competitiveness in the digital age. They have the potential to revolutionise businesses by enabling agility, scalability, cost-efficiency, reliability, and faster time-to-market.

However, careful planning, skill development, and a thoughtful approach to security and vendor selection are critical to maximising the advantages and mitigating the risks.  By entrusting this complex process to a professional, experienced digital marketing agencies like Nerdware, companies can benefit from deep cross-functional expertise, and gain peace of mind knowing that their transition to the cloud will be seamless and productive.