Why Enterprises Should Embrace Cloud Native

Traits of the 21st-Century Enterprise

• Data-Driven Culture — Enterprises need to evolve from being people-dependent to being data-driven yet people-centric, applying technology to transform execution and business models through an ecosystem of distributed teams.
• Relentless Innovation — Companies should innovate relentlessly across all areas of the business, including product R&D, customer support and engagement, supply chain, talent development, sales and marketing.
• Customer Centric — Customers are no longer satisfied with point solutions but expect a consistently satisfactory end-to-end experience. Thinking as the customer is key to serving them in the age of hyper-personalisation.
• Agile and Lean — Enterprises need to be lean and agile to handle fast-paced shifts in market conditions and customer expectations.
• Being Purposeful — Organizations must have a clear purpose that enables full engagement of heart and mind, creating sustained outcomes that drive value and fuel growth while strengthening communities, environment and society.

What Is Cloud Native?

Cloud native is an approach for building and running applications that exploits the cloud computing delivery model. Cloud native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications for diverse environments like public, private, or hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure and declarative APIs exemplify this approach — built on key pillars of cloud infrastructure, microservices-based application architecture, modern design principles (e.g. twelve-factor applications), containerisation for software packaging, and automation in configuration and deployment.

Cloud native is not only about building applications for cloud infrastructure — it's a set of practices that enable scalability, agility and resilience within the culture of an organisation. These practices don't only impact the technology team; they're a foundation around which every department needs to be realigned to remain relevant and competitive.

Cloud Native Technologies Landscape

There are multiple visualisations for the landscape of cloud native technologies, platforms and solutions. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has over 1,100 registered companies offering solutions across different categories of the landscape. The landscape below spans software development, service delivery, and service operation phases.

Benefits of the Cloud Native Approach

Applications developed in the cloud naturally perform well in this environment, letting you leverage everything it has to offer. What exactly do you gain once you decide to invest in the cloud-native approach?

• Faster time to market: the pace at which an enterprise can deliver value to customers is what makes it stand out among competitors. Cloud native development processes — including DevOps and automation — accelerate software delivery and expedite time to market.
• Reduced total cost of ownership: TCO includes not just hardware and software acquisition, but support, operations, and the opportunity cost of downtime. Adopting cloud native reduces overall TCO for the enterprise.
• Enhanced reliability: the cloud native approach leverages distributed application design using microservices built as containers and managed by a container orchestration platform like Kubernetes, increasing solution reliability and scalability.
• Improved security: cloud-native systems are "secure by design" — security measures are applied while the application is being developed, and apps are built from smaller, separately secured components.
• Flexible infrastructure usage: cloud native solutions are containerised applications that are easy to port across cloud service providers, ensuring no vendor lock-in and letting enterprises select the most cost-optimised vendor.

In our view, enterprises need to wholeheartedly embrace cloud native to stay relevant and stay competitive.