Top 3 Reasons Why Application Development in the Cloud Can Drive Better Products & Services Faster

In the last decade, digital technology has shifted power from companies to consumers, making it increasingly harder for brands to achieve differentiation in a commoditized world. At the same time, businesses continue to struggle to build enterprise applications fast enough. But cloud technology is forging a new way to build software and accelerate innovation.

As more and more organizations adopt cloud-based applications, platforms, and services for greater elasticity and faster delivery times, the benefits of cloud computing are moving beyond simply acquiring technological agility to powering business innovation. IBM’s latest Institute for Business Value study found 74 percent of enterprises significantly achieved improved customer experiences through its cloud initiatives.

Today, applications sit at the heart of today’s enterprise businesses, and bringing better digital experiences to customers requires cloud technology and a solid data strategy. Let’s begin with discussing the top 3 benefits of migrating and developing applications in the cloud.

1. AppDev Happens More Quickly in the Cloud

One of the most exciting services the cloud offers is the ability to build applications with speed. When application development and testing are done in a cloud environment, there's no waiting to procure, configure, provision infrastructure, so software and microservices can be updated and released faster. The increased speed becomes a huge factor when reacting to changes in consumer preferences and trends or resolving issues. The bottom line: Dev teams can focus on creating the application itself rather than worrying about infrastructure, storage, or even horsepower.

2. Agility + Reliability + Speed = Better, Stronger, Faster

Cloud environments offer access to the latest automation technology for agility and speed. These can include development platforms, such as Kubernetes for automating application deployment and management, and cloud-based tooling for AI/ML. Cloud infrastructure is also more scalable to handle peaks and valleys in development cycles. Cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and GCP have pay as you go models, so you only pay for increased usage when you need it.

Moreover, the cloud is more reliable than most in-house data centers. Many cloud providers have service level agreements that ensure uptime with costs associated when applications are not available or slower than usual. While there have been well-publicized failures, many providers learn from those events and build resilience and redundancy into their infrastructure to overcome issues, such as human error or malicious hacking attempts. It’s much more difficult for an enterprise to have the same level of reliability and resilience.

3. Meeting Consumer Demand via Self-Service

Banks, hotels, airlines, and retailers lead the way in giving customers the ability to access their information, make changes, and conduct transactions without the delay of human interaction. That’s because cloud providers assume the administrative burden related to creating users and managing user requests through their tools and infrastructure that facilitates a seamless and reliable experience. Motivated by independence and efficiency, it’s fair to say that most Gen Xers, millennials, and even some baby-boomers prefer self-service technology rather than long waits on the phone.

Building Applications Faster Means Building Products and Services Faster

Innovative businesses, like Choice Hotels International, are leveraging the cloud to create new products and services, reach new customers, and gain entry into a new industry or market.

But as organizations are racing to the cloud, data must also keep pace to support a solid and secure digital foundation on which to build their business.

With more than 7,000 franchises open in over 40 countries and territories, Choice Hotels was looking to shift more and more workloads to the cloud to bring greater efficiency and agility to the business. Unfortunately, governing and managing data for the software development lifecycle posed an issue to fully adopting cloud. However with a DataOps platform, they were able to automate data environments in the cloud to fuel mission-critical digital transformation initiatives.

Achieving the benefits of cloud migration is much easier with DataOps because this methodology aligns the people, process, and technology to enable the secure distribution and management of data. So, migrating applications to a public cloud doesn’t have to take a herculean effort and come at the cost of data privacy.

Specifically, a DataOps platform like Delphix can boost application development by bringing:

• Data agility and portability at massive scale. Bringing customer data source from various data sources can be a challenge. With DataOps, data teams can keep their data distribution model as flexible as their infrastructure and have the ability to deliver data from any data source to enable rapid development and delivery of applications as well as derive insights that drive better business decisions.

• Rapid data access in expanded cloud architecture. Enterprises can centrally manage and govern the distribution of non-production data across clouds.

• Data governance for regulatory compliance and data privacy. Its integrated masking capabilities can automatically identify and replace sensitive data to ensure only secure data is sent to test environments in the cloud.

• Modernization of application development in the cloud. While most companies start with a lift and shift to migrate their apps to the cloud, a DataOps platform has the ability to deliver data to test environments in minutes and remove bottlenecks from DevOps workflows, enabling enterprise teams to continuously iterate on application functionality and leverage new cloud services for ongoing improvements.

By migrating application development and testing to the cloud, enterprises can increase innovation speed that closely aligns with customer needs. DataOps removes data as a barrier when developing outstanding online and mobile experiences that can strengthen relationships with customers and propel the enterprise to a market-leading position.

In a world where every company is becoming a data company, the faster an enterprise can develop innovative applications and microservices, the quicker they can out-innovate the competition.