The digital shift has taken place, up in the clouds, and the cloud and digital-native ecosystems that thrive on DevOps and FinOps are disrupting the business world. A recent analysis by McKinsey of the global value of cloud, including digitisation, digitalisation, and cloud-native architecture, found that the total value is $873 billion. IT cost optimisation improvements equal $155 billion, digitisation of core operations sits at $311 billion, and business resilience and risk reduction at $407 billion. The firm also found that the cloud was capable of generating $3 trillion in ebitda value by 2030.
Forrester’s analysis of the leading trends shaping the organisation found that cloudnative is important to strategic success. And a piece-by-piece approach to cloud adoption and integration within the enterprise isn’t delivering. The business needs an ecosystem that’s capable of pulling all the digital threads together using a platform-based approach that’s capable of ongoing modernisation. As the firm puts it: “Yesterday’s cloud deployments are already legacy and organisations must adapt.”
Gartner predicts that more than 85% of organisations will embrace the principle of cloud-first by 2025. It has also said that companies that don’t adopt a cloud-native approach won’t fully realise their digital strategies. A cloud-native approach is needed to handle the workloads and digital demands of the modern organisation. As Milind Govekar, distinguished vice president at Gartner, says: “New workloads deployed in a cloud-native environment will be pervasive, not just popular, and anything non-cloudy will be considered legacy.”
What is cloud-native?
Cloud-native means platforms that can be tailored and customised to fit within specific industry niches and use cases. It can leverage automation and compute at the edge to create digital ecosystems that are agile, purposebuilt, multicloud and fast. Application-driven ecosystems can fully realise the potential of the distributed compute offered by the cloud.
VMware describes it as an approach to “developing, deploying and running applications using cloud computing methods and tools.”
GitLab says it’s an approach that “uses technologies such as containers, Kubernetes, immutable infrastructure and microservices to develop scalable applications built to run in the cloud.”
Amazon says that cloud-native is the “software approach of building, deploying and managing modern applications in cloud computing environments.”
And the Cloud Native Computing Foundation says: “Cloud-native technologies empower organisations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructures and declarative APIs exemplify this approach.”
How does cloud-native help the organisation?
Companies still face significant hurdles when it comes to digital transformation. They want architecture that can deliver services at the speed of client consumption and demand, but they also need security and compliance. The cloud-native approach to digitalisation and transformation is a shift to the edge and is built on the foundations of DevSecOps within an application environment that’s designed for agility and speed.
Using a cloud-native approach to architecture and infrastructure, organisations across every sector can benefit from the ability to scale and develop services quickly. As Forrester puts it, the power of a cloud-native approach grants the enterprise access to vibrant open source communities, effective vendor product implementations, and a dynamic ecosystem that allows for more innovative use of big data, analytics, AI and machine learning.
Put me in a container
Brainstorm: What are the biggest challenges companies face with digital transformation and how does the cloud-native approach resolve them?
Sabine Dall’Omo, CEO, Siemens South Africa: Some of the biggest challenges include the complexity of blended IT/OT operations, the need to maintain security and compliance, and the ability to scale rapidly. A cloud-native approach helps to address these challenges by providing a flexible and scalable infrastructure that is designed to support modern applications and services.
Jeff Ryan, MD, AWCape: The biggest challenges that companies face with digital transformation are often related to disparate systems, lack of realtime financial visibility, and spending excessive time on manual processes like Excel and report-generation.
These challenges can hinder efficiency, decision-making, and overall business performance. By leveraging cloud-based finance solutions, companies can centralise their financial data, streamline processes, and gain real-time visibility into their financial performance.
Reven Singh, sales engineer, InterSystems South Africa: Digital transformation is often overplayed, partly because it’s an overused term that people try to relate to every form of modern IT project. The complexity of the technology presents challenges to those trying to transform legacy systems seamlessly. They may face interoperability issues or data discrepancies, and user resistance.
Cloud-native helps organisations circumnavigate these challenges as the business is immediately afforded more flexibility. A company can quickly scale resources and storage without the added cost of physical infrastructure.
Using the cloud as part of a digital transformation project also allows a business to carve off projects in stages, and that success is encouraging for users. It also opens the way for creating a centralised data fabric. Dorio Bowes, director, Westcon-Comstor Sub-Saharan Africa: Challenges such as budget, the skills gap, enablement and awareness and security are at the core of delaying the DX journey of an organisation, and a cloud approach helps customers by giving them the freedom they need to embrace the challenge one step at a time.
Brainstorm: What cloud-native applications and methodologies have you implemented in your business and how have they delivered on their promise?
Sabine Dall’Omo, CEO, Siemens South Africa: Our cloud-native approach has helped us to drive innovation at scale by providing us with a flexible and scalable infrastructure that allows us to quickly develop and deploy new applications and services.
Andrew Essey, cloud practice manager, Dariel Software: We integrated a cloud-native solution, utilising serverless technologies like an API gateway, [serverless computing with AWS] Lambda, and [Amazon’s] Aurora PostgreSQL, which enabled seamless scalability and maintenance.
Dorio Bowes, Westcon-Comstor Sub-Saharan Africa: We use multiple cloudbased systems for ERP, ecommerce, collaboration, and even CRM. This includes Microsoft, SAP and solutions such as BlueSky and PartnerCentral.
These are used internally and are extended externally to our partners. By using multiple cloud environments, we can derive expressly what we need from each one, both internally for staff and externally for our partners.
Kiveshen Moodley, country manager, Workday South Africa: We use our entire platform to manage our business. When it comes to making decisions based on people or the financial side, we do it in real-time. We get insight into things that might not be working and we make changes in-flight to improve and grow our people and our business. We’re also able to understand the skills that exist in our organisation and leverage these skills as we assign new projects and initiatives.”
Dion Visagie, director, Infinetix: The complexity of running IT is increasing. Higher data volumes, increasing number of remote users, privacy regulations and data security can all have their own challenges.
Winston Ritson, chief operations officer, Liquid C2: We have invested very heavily in compute, storage and security in the cloud. A number of these solutions have been designed to cater to our specific business, enabling us to become more efficient and secure. Across the wider organisation, we’ve enabled and trained staff to use zero code tools like Power Apps from Microsoft. We’ve seen a marked improvement in our delivery timelines and productivity levels by using Power Apps.
Put me in a container
It’s not just Star Trek that can beam people around the world. Welcome to Makosi’s cloud-native ingenuity.
Digital transformation has long moved past the hype. Makosi, a company that provides accounting firms with talent on an as-needed basis, has actively leveraged digital and cloudnative capabilities to empower its team of digital natives and take the business in a unique direction. The company outsources talented professionals to organisations around the world without the need for any human to set foot in any physical office. It’s an entirely digital environment that allows for talent and companies seeking talent to connect and work without friction.
“We wanted to ensure we could scale our business at speed, so we were able to respond to client needs as quickly and easily as switching on a lightbulb,” says Darren Isaacs, CEO and co-founder. “We also had to consider that in professional services, you have two customers – your employees and your clients. It was important for us to define the journey for those two customers and determine how they intersect.”
The company dug down into granular detail as to what this journey would entail and how technology could empower every aspect of the business and its processes. The technology stack started with Salesforce in the back-end and it was then overlaid with PHP to create a unified end-user experience. Due to challenges around data replication, the company integrated a database that sat between Salesforce and the front-end that ended up being the space in which most development work took place.
“We can now innovate on the fly and have implemented technologies using a very agile and rapid approach to refine experiences,” says Isaacs. “We needed the technology to fit around the experience we’re trying to create.” When the company launched, it found that even though it had people using the platform and there was significant user traction, there was limited uptake from end clients.
“South Africans have very diverse backgrounds and we had opened up our talent pool to global public accounting firms; we realised that clients were intimidated by people’s names,” says Isaacs. “They couldn’t pronounce the names so they steered away from them. So, we used this insight to create short video clips that were attached to digital profiles that then transformed engagement. Clients didn’t care about names they couldn’t pronounce, they just saw an incredibly well-spoken person with exceptional experience.” Makosi now provides accountants to companies like Price Bailey, PKF Texas, Cooper Parry, and Marcum and every interaction and connection is entirely digital.
Digital transformation has long moved past the hype. Makosi, a company that provides accounting firms with talent on an as-needed basis, has actively leveraged digital and cloudnative capabilities to empower its team of digital natives and take the business in a unique direction. The company outsources talented professionals to organisations around the world without the need for any human to set foot in any physical office. It’s an entirely digital environment that allows for talent and companies seeking talent to connect and work without friction.
“We wanted to ensure we could scale our business at speed, so we were able to respond to client needs as quickly and easily as switching on a lightbulb,” says Darren Isaacs, CEO and co-founder. “We also had to consider that in professional services, you have two customers – your employees and your clients. It was important for us to define the journey for those two customers and determine how they intersect.”
The company dug down into granular detail as to what this journey would entail and how technology could empower every aspect of the business and its processes. The technology stack started with Salesforce in the back-end and it was then overlaid with PHP to create a unified end-user experience. Due to challenges around data replication, the company integrated a database that sat between Salesforce and the front-end that ended up being the space in which most development work took place.
“We can now innovate on the fly and have implemented technologies using a very agile and rapid approach to refine experiences,” says Isaacs. “We needed the technology to fit around the experience we’re trying to create.” When the company launched, it found that even though it had people using the platform and there was significant user traction, there was limited uptake from end clients.
“South Africans have very diverse backgrounds and we had opened up our talent pool to global public accounting firms; we realised that clients were intimidated by people’s names,” says Isaacs. “They couldn’t pronounce the names so they steered away from them. So, we used this insight to create short video clips that were attached to digital profiles that then transformed engagement. Clients didn’t care about names they couldn’t pronounce, they just saw an incredibly well-spoken person with exceptional experience.” Makosi now provides accountants to companies like Price Bailey, PKF Texas, Cooper Parry, and Marcum and every interaction and connection is entirely digital.
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* Article first published on brainstorm.itweb.co.za