The 4 benefits of going cloud-native

The cloud has been part of our lives for long enough now that we understand its significance. In the RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud report, 94 percent of enterprise and SMBs are already are using the cloud.

Now businesses are focused on adopting a cloud-first strategy, moving beyond the compute, storage, and network benefits. Cloud-native is where you build and run applications completely in the cloud – no on-premise infrastructure required.

Having your applications and systems in the cloud lets you take advantage of new technology easier. By being completely serverless, your employees can operate faster and more flexibly. It’s easy to as scale your business grows and it also makes adapting to changing market environments easier. By not relying on on-premises infrastructure, your organisation also becomes more resilient while reducing spend on IT.

Businesses are also increasingly looking to cloud-native applications to take advantage of technologies such as serverless computing, machine learning, and IoT.

But how do you know if this approach is right for you and your organisation?

1. Effective people

Willis Towers Watson moved to the cloud so they could become more resilient and make employees more effective. They were using more than 80 on-premise servers to store and process data to provide analytic capabilities that help insurers calculate reserves and prices accurately.

By becoming cloud-native, employees are more efficient meaning they now can do the types of jobs they couldn’t when they were using on-premise systems, such as delivering services to SMBs in new markets.

“With Microsoft Azure, we have the agility and scale to react to project demands much more quickly,” says Greg Matuskovic, Director of Global Solutions Architecture, Insurance Consulting and Technology.

Best of all, it makes remote and flexible working easier. With 79 percent of UK employees believing that flexible working makes them more productive, it’s important to ensure you set up your teams for success – something being cloud-native will help you do.

2. Connected customers

Finastra―a leader in financial software and cloud solutions―wanted to encourage open-source collaboration for its FusionFabric.cloud development ecosystem. By moving FusionFabric.cloud to Azure, the organisation has made customer access to the platform ten times faster.

Félix Grévy, Global Head of Product Management at FusionFabric.cloud explains, “Our goal was to create an ecosystem of development partners to deliver applications quickly and at low cost. At the same time, our customers would be able to leverage fintech innovation in our familiar and stable workflow environment.”

Finastra found that Azure seamlessly integrated their development tools, while implementing a microservices-based, cloud-native architecture. This makes it easier to develop and scale applications.

3. Secure business

In the NCSC’s cyber security breaches survey, 42 percent of SMBs surveyed identified at least one breach or attack. In 17 percent of those cases, it took businesses a day or more to recover. By being on the cloud, you remove a single point of failure. And with instant backups, you’re up and running before you know it.

To keep up with the scale of cloud-native, you need automatic detection and response to match the scale. Azure is built with security in mind to help you detect, protect, and respond.

Azure Sentinel takes advantage of the scalability and flexibility found from being cloud-native as well as the power of AI to make your threat detection response faster and smarter. Microsoft Threat Experts is another cloud solution that adds context-rich intelligence to enhance your security.

There’s lots of security benefits in the cloud. It also makes it easier to manage users, data, and access, meaning your employees can get on with focusing on the core of your business and you can get back to doing more of what you love.

4. Efficient growth

Because you have the power of new technology, you can take advantage of things like AI or machine learning to gain insights and innovate quicker. And it doesn’t require hiring a whole team of data scientists to implement it.

“Microsoft allows us to be a pure-play software product company that’s evolving to a software solution company, that’s evolving to a software platform company, all three on the Microsoft Azure Stack,” says Simon Paris, Finastra CEO. “That opens up a whole new potential for us to move into marketplaces and data monetisation, and become the pre-eminent software player in global financial services.”

Being cloud-native lowers the barriers SMB’s often face when accessing cutting-edge technology. By improving access, it makes it easier for you to innovate and you’re your business successfully.

 

In a world where your business needs to respond in an agile way to the changing world around it, cloud-native lets you innovate and do more, faster. Become more flexible and responsive in a fast-changing environment, while staying secure, giving your employees time to do more of what they love, whilst being able to better connect with your customers.

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