Whether we’re tackling customer relationship management or collaborating with remote teams in real time, the way we work has evolved because of applications leveraging cloud technologies. Cloud has enabled customers to adopt new features more quickly and easily scale to meet demand. These digital tools have quickly become essential in our current business landscape where countless professionals are working from home. Without cloud the rapid digital transformation in response to the COVID-19 pandemic would have been difficult for many organizations to achieve.

To keep the momentum going, business leaders and IT decision makers are adopting cloud technologies and services faster than ever before. Traditionally developed applications that are “retrofitted” to operate in the cloud are just the beginning for organizations with ambitious digital transformation strategies. For those enterprise IT teams focused on business velocity and growth, there are benefits to incorporating cloud in the beginning of the design process.

The business case for adopting a cloud native approach

Cloud native computing is the most recent and perhaps the most notable innovation to come out of widespread digitization initiatives at the enterprise level. Both the companies that are adopting digital transformation plans in response to COVID-19 and those that are digital-first organizations can use a cloud native approach to gain an edge over competition.

The payoff for those who adopt this approach to the development of applications and services is that they will be able to quickly meet customer demands and bring new ideas to market sooner, helping the organization grow and maintain their leadership. Increasing productivity, lowering costs and drastically reducing the time it takes to ensure new applications are operational are just a few of the other benefits companies are seeing by integrating cloud native services into the application architecture.

Unlocking the full potential of cloud investment

Cloud native applications are meant to enable business systems to become tools of strategic transformation. Applications and systems built using a cloud first design philosophy are all about speed and agility. And, in the context of today’s digital environment, these applications can enable scale and resilience for critical business systems at a time when it’s never been more important. Especially now, when we are seeing applications as a primary revenue driver.

The arrival of cloud architectures has enabled organizations to achieve transformational digital business outcomes. In fact, 93 per cent of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy in place today. But with these shifts, come growing pains. While new cloud technologies have increased the ability for businesses to deliver seamless digital experiences for customers and employees, they have also led to more distributed application architectures. As a result, enterprise technologists who normally use traditional IT systems to run the business, are operating in a hybrid environment they are not equipped to visualize end-to-end.
Customers, who are the end users of these applications, expect high responsiveness, along with innovative features and stable performance. The companies who are unable to meet these demands won’t be given the time of day for very long. Nothing will send customers to your competitor faster than frequent performance problems and recurring errors with your applications.

That is where cloud native solutions from application performance monitoring providers like AppDynamics come in. These capabilities help IT professionals confidently create cloud native applications that perform as intended. That’s how a major American airline gets a holistic view of its customer experience, giving IT teams the data-driven insights they need to reduce response time and keep guests happy. Business leaders benefit from having access to relevant data showing them how well the business side of the application is performing.

Doubling down on digitization strategy

By adopting a forward-thinking approach to enterprise technology, you can enable scale and resilience for the business systems that will be critical to the success of your organization in the years to come. Cloud native is the future of application development, and its potential impact on businesses can’t be understated.

As IT departments adopt more cloud native services, the task of optimizing performance and designing new features at scale becomes increasingly challenging. As business leaders look to get the most out of their cloud investments, it’s important to seek out cloud native solutions that provide enterprise IT with meaningful business context and a 360-degree view across all application environments.

About Gregg Ostrowski
Gregg Ostrowski is a Regional CTO at AppDynamics. He engages with customer senior leadership to help prioritize their strategy for digital transformation.

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