3 ways enterprises can deliver cloud-native innovation 1/3
In rapidly changing markets where sheer agility gives cloud-native entrants the edge, the pressure is on to ditch legacy systems to stay ahead of the pack. However, while cloud-native app development adds flexibility and efficiency, it also creates its own challenges. It demands a robust infrastructure and an effective strategy for development and migration. It requires a way to combat the explosion of apps and the resulting app sprawl. How can enterprises meet these challenges and deliver innovation at speed?
These three approaches will help businesses overcome this challenge.
Drive efficiency
On the one hand, the rapid growth of digital tools has empowered employees to communicate, collaborate, and meet customer needs in a world where remote working has become mainstream. On the other, it leaves them juggling a wide range of applications while they search for the functions and information they need. A November 2021 Harvard Business Review Analytics Services survey found nearly half of the executives responding believed this juggling actively hampered productivity. What’s more, app sprawl makes it harder to control costs, with more platforms and services to pay for and little visibility or control. Throw in the need to maintain lingering legacy systems, and it’s harder for IT teams to manage the estate and drive innovation.
Here, hyperconverged platforms can help, providing the enterprise with a single platform that scales out from the core data centre to the edge, managed from a single point. Businesses can roll out the infrastructure for new apps in minutes, optimized for specific workloads, while maintaining control and restraining app sprawl, even consolidating around a smaller range of digital tools. The result? Faster time to value meets improved cost efficiency.
Increase agility
If they want to compete against cloud-native upstarts, established businesses need the same agility and flexibility. They need to be able to launch new services in days or hours, not months, and to be able to run workloads from the most cost-effective, performant platform. The problem is that moving applications between clouds is never seamless, involving retooling, refactoring, and rearchitecting, and the situation only worsens with legacy applications, where refactoring can be expensive and lift-and-shift migration ineffective.
With a hyperconverged infrastructure, these issues all but disappear. Enterprises have the freedom to provision resources rapidly and move workloads where they need to be, whether that’s on-premises hardware or private or public cloud. They scale up or down without disruption and move workloads without needing to refactor or rearchitect. With one seamless infrastructure, you can have maximum agility.
Tighten up governance and security
App sprawl isn’t good for productivity or cost control – and it’s definitely not good for security. A 2021 survey for Productiv found that business units were managing more enterprise applications than IT, accounting for 56% of all company app ownership and management. In environments where IT doesn’t have full visibility and oversight, this leaves a huge attack surface with no practical way to protect it. What’s more, with multiple SaaS applications and platforms, ensuring compliance becomes a complexity nightmare, while IT soon earns a reputation as the ‘department of no.’
A hyperconverged platform can prevent this scenario, providing a safe platform for innovation where business teams can be creative and pilot new applications without IT losing visibility and control. On a platform with unified, built-in security features, IT can view and protect the whole stack, from core to edge, while putting the governance in place to enhance security, manage risk, and control data access. Here, the combination of Nutanix’s infrastructure and robust data controls combined with the hardware-level security built into Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs can protect virtualised and containerised workloads, detect and safeguard against intrusion, and support confidential computing throughout the hybrid cloud.
Nobody wants to constrain innovation, yet IT teams need to bring the law to the cloud-native app frontier. With the right hyperconverged infrastructure, they have the means to do just that. Find out more on the Nutanix website.