In our tech trends for 2022 series, we’ve already talked about how businesses will be looking to get on top of the data explosion that’s happening across their ecosystems. One of the major contributing factors to the surge in data generation, and another of our tech trends for the next 12 months, is the increased popularity of cloud-native platforms and applications.
What are cloud-native platforms?
Cloud-native platforms are those that have been designed and developed specifically for cloud deployment. Rather than taking an existing off-cloud application and migrating it to the Cloud, cloud-native applications are uniquely designed to operate within the Cloud and harness its full potential. They leverage the Cloud’s speed and agility, making it easier for organisations to rapidly and frequently build, release and deploy applications and updates, allowing for increased agility, resilience and scalability across clouds.
In its look ahead to 2022, technology research company Gartner predicts that cloud-native architecture and technologies will become an indispensable element in businesses digital strategies. Analysts predict that by 2025, 85% of organisations will have embraced a cloud-first approach, and more than 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms – up from 30% in 2021.
A move away from lift-and-shift
It’s clear, then, that businesses that have taken tentative steps towards digitalisation of estates will need to significantly up their game over the next 12 months. With the traditional office-based model of working giving way to more remote and hybrid environments, data, infrastructure, workstreams and technologies have become as geographically dispersed as the workforce itself, and this necessitates more widespread cloud adoption.
Cloud-native platforms will become central to the new environment, leveraging, as they do, the essence of cloud tech to offer IT-related capabilities as a service for IT teams.
The coming year will see bigger organisations moving away from a lift-and-shift approach, whereby existing applications are migrated wholesale to the Cloud (an approach which often poses latency and performance issues) towards cloud-native technologies that stand them in better stead for meeting their competitive challenges.
What does a cloud-native platform offer?
Cloud-native platforms and applications can be accessed from anywhere, on any device, and by any number of users. Delivering a seamless and shared experience across the organisation by giving access to the same content and features at all times.
The nature of cloud-based platforms and applications, brings a whole host of benefits for IT teams and their wider organisations including:
- Portability of workloads – Isolated tasks enables changes between different servers and clouds to be updated rapidly and scale, accelerating time to market for new or more complex applications.
- Tracing and identification of bugs: Faster detection allows updates to be fixed and rolled out across the ecosystem quickly.
- Ecosystem updates: Can be deployed automatically, without interfering with the entire user base.
- Damage limitation: Container isolation means in the event of failure, damage is limited and preserves the integrity of the wider application.
- Automated restorative backup: In the event of widespread failure, automation can restore the application to a previous stable state, ensuring downtime is limited or even non-existent.
All of this leads to happier users, happier teams, and an organisation that is set up to capitalise on its competitive edge.
More tech trends for 2022
Want to know what else to expect in the world of technology in 2022? Read the other articles in the series:
