Before the difficult times of COVID-19, each enterprise was operating on its own legacy system and had different cloud strategies altogether. Whether it was about moving their email server to the cloud, switching to innovative office applications, or even exiting their own data centers and going fully cloud-native, each organization thought and planned the implementation of the cloud differently.
When the pandemic hit, companies were pushed into warp speed to implement cloud solutions in order to keep their business running. There was no time for extensive user acceptance testing, long rounds of strategy meetings, RFPs, and proof of concept because enterprises were guided to send all their employees to work from home almost overnight.
Did You Know?
The worldwide enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure bypassed spending on data center hardware and software for the first time in 2020. According to the research by Synergy Research Group, this acceleration in a decade-long industry trend was due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The Journey of Enterprise Evolution with Cloud Computing
Remote Working
As the pandemic took a grip of the world and forced people to set up their home offices, the first key step for CIOs was to enable employees to work from anywhere without having to pipe into legacy on-premises email, collaboration, HR, or document storage systems. Basically, a SaaS solution. This gave rise to software like Zoom, Microsoft, and other innovative office applications.
Cloud-Native Opportunities
Once employees set up to work productively from home, IT leaders went on to maintain their momentum by pushing more and more legacy workloads into a consistent cloud consumption model. But unlike one-size-fits-all SaaS solutions, many business applications brought a tougher set of decisions for architects and developer leads to make around what to lift and shift and what to rearchitect for the cloud.
From banks and restaurants to gyms, all business entities were shut down for a longer period of 2020. This led to the development of a massive amount of cloud solutions. Cloud-native has been the scaffold of the COVID era.
Migration to Cloud
The final piece of the puzzle is moving legacy workloads onto the cloud. Yes, we’re talking about moving 20-to-30-year-old supply chain or payments systems residing on mainframes and written in languages like Cobol, etc.
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What’s Unique About Modern Cloud Infrastructure?
Long story short, the cloud is synonymous with the on-demand resource availability, full-service, API-driven, and pay-per-use model. Recent years have made cloud consumption models popular and competitive by starting cloud infrastructure consolidation, requiring the infrastructure to be cost-effective, power-efficient, feature-rich, simplified, and scalable.
Here are the four top-most themes of modern cloud infrastructures:
1. Clean Slate Physical Infrastructure
2. High Degree of Vertical Integration
3. Focused on Operations
4. Security at The Core
To keep your cloud infrastructure efficient, secure, operational, and future-proof, you must follow these themes. Cloud infrastructure is something that will continue to evolve, take advantage of resource pooling and provide more innovative services based on custom infrastructure, such as quantum computing.
Conclusion: The COVID-19 pandemic pushed organizations into confronting their legacy technology burdens and placed the cloud in the center of all attention. However, getting old systems to the cloud was never an overnight task and so the journey of enterprise evolution began with the enablement of remote work. From thereon, companies seized the cloud-native opportunity and conveniently moved their legacy applications to the cloud.
Then, along with the unprecedented growth for the cloud infrastructure, came massive economies of scale that prompted building purpose-built infrastructure blocks providing a scalable, efficient and simplified architecture.
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