It is no secret that the world of technology is changing at an unprecedented rate. The way we live and work has changed dramatically in just a few short years, especially after COVID-19.
As the industry continues to grow and evolve, one thing remains constant: businesses need to stay up-to-date with the latest trends if they want to succeed. With the help of Tech London Advocates and Global Tech Advocates, a digital transformation innovators report published by Contino displayed a list of the top 20 digital transformation leaders and how they changed their business.
They found that cloud-native approaches can help organizations improve their business performance and remain competitive in today’s fast-paced world.
What Does Cloud-native Development Mean?
Cloud-native development is a methodology for developing, running, and operating cloud-based applications & software. It’s specific to the type of application you’re building as well as your business needs. The model provides flexibility, portability, and scalability that traditional systems can’t offer.
Although there are many different types of Cloud-native apps across various industries (e.g., entertainment or financial sectors), they all share similar characteristics: –
- They mostly run on public clouds like AWS, Azure, or Google Compute Engine.
- They use microservices architecture to function more efficiently.
- They have automation tools to facilitate deployment.
Benefits of Cloud-Native Development
Cloud-native development has had a tremendous impact on businesses. Here are some of its key benefits:
Speed
Cloud-native apps can be developed and deployed in a fraction of the time it would typically take. This is because they offer increased automation, scalability, and portability, so businesses don’t have to spend extra money hiring teams for specialized roles.
Flexibility
With cloud-native development, systems are adaptable, so companies don’t need to make costly changes when their business needs change or if technology demands evolve over time. Enterprises also get access to new features as soon as they’re released without waiting for upgrades every year as traditional software licenses provide them with.
Cost Efficiency
Since you only pay per use instead of making an upfront investment into hardware & infrastructure, costs go down considerably, making this approach very cost-efficient.
Customer Experience
Businesses that have taken a more modern approach experience higher customer satisfaction rates as their users benefit from increased responsiveness & availability of the apps they use. This helps businesses save on operational costs and acquire new customers faster than before.
Easy to Manage
Cloud-native apps are highly manageable as they’re built with automation tools that can be integrated into existing workflows. This allows businesses to save on IT labor costs and spend more time focusing on delivering business value.
Security & Reliability
Cloud-native apps are more secure and reliable than traditional ones. This is because they have time to mature in a production environment before being made available for public use, which makes them thoroughly tested when they meet market demand.
How Have Business Leaders Embraced a Cloud-Native Digital Transformation?
Gary Delooze – CIO Nationwide Building Society
Gary has always been interested in making a difference, and joining Nationwide was the opportunity to do just that. Gary came to Nationwide in 2017, where he helped the company reduce dependence on third-party service providers for software development and rebuild it for the Building Society.
He joined Nationwide at a time when 90% of its IT tasks were outsourced, which meant expenses and delays for the company. Gary started increasing inhouse development and moving to cloud-native applications to reduce complexity and increase productivity.
Now with 50% of the IT capacity in-house, Nationwide is better positioned to profit and be more efficient.
Hima Mandali – Chief Technology Officer Solarisbank
Solarisbank is Europe’s leading tech company with a banking license and offers an innovative platform for banking as a service. Hima joined Solarisbank in 2019 when the company’s original legacy provider had many problems.
Hima developed a new 100% API-based platform that is simple, flexible, independent and allows the customer to easily integrate APIs to create individual products. Using that platform, Vivid Money built a new bank from the ground up in just five months.
After testing this new platform, Samsung Pay ignored all other options and decided to use Solarisbank as its sole Germany partner.
In 2020, Solarisbank decided to shift this platform to AWS, and they were able to do so without any downtime for the users. Now, they are planning to expand in the whole of Europe since replicating in the cloud is so easy.
Following the results of their digital transformation process, Hima said that they invested in the people; “putting tech people at the forefront of banking projects and solving problems with a piece of code rather than processes.”