Infrastructure Modernization, the Digital Native Way
- By Paul Mah
- September 12, 2022
Achieving business agility and innovation has never been more important with intensifying competition and an increasingly uncertain economic climate. The urgency is even greater now, as a new generation of digital native businesses has risen in virtually every industry, seeking to displace or outmaneuver incumbents or less digitally savvy businesses.
“Unless enterprises evolve to match the pace of innovation with which digital natives are moving, they might face significant market pressure and risk losing their business to new competitors,” noted Yash Thakker, the Director of Cloud Consulting at Searce.
Building the agile business
One way to evolve is through infrastructure modernization, which Thakkar says can empower organizations to innovate at a faster pace. While there is certainly nothing wrong with the client-server or three-tier applications still in widespread use, Thakker observed that businesses with such deployments are typically less agile.
“[To add new features], you need to refactor the monolithic application or redesign your solution, and get the hardware sized to the new requirements. You need to look at the deployment cycle, and schedule downtime for the infrastructure to redeploy the updated application. The manpower and human intervention required for this is very high,” he explained.
On the other hand, a digital native would implement their software quite differently. Thakker said: “Application functionality would be split into microservices and deployed as part of a Kubernetes cluster in the cloud. You can make a change in one part of your application, leaving the rest untouched. Changes would be pushed out through an automated DevOps pipeline, giving you seamless deployment without any application downtime.”
"The outcome is greatly enhanced operational efficiency; where three persons were required to manage the system in the past, you now require just one – and this person might even be a shared resource. You also have lower hardware costs, because you have moved to auto-scalable architecture that reacts to the traffic your application is getting, you have the most efficient hardware cost, and you have much faster rollout cycles.”
The agile mindset
How would one build a digitally native company today? According to Thakker, a digital native organization is born-in-the-cloud and will also seek to fully leverage the advantages offered by the cloud, as well as implement extensive automation.
“A digital native will look at operational efficiency as one of the key components while making technology decisions. Because of the kind of growth mindset some of these companies carry, which might see them growing a hundredfold within a relatively short period, they seek to automate many of their technical tasks.”
To illustrate the advantage of the cloud, Thakker pointed to Google Cloud Spanner, a distributed cloud database service, as an example. In an on-premises world, an enterprise that wants to deploy a synchronized database across six countries would need to develop the platform, purchase server hardware, deploy them in different data centers spread over six countries, and ensure they comply with local regulations, says Thakker.
“It takes you six minutes to do that with Google Cloud Spanner. Cloud-native organizations are very product-centric in their mindsets compared to the more infrastructure-centric mindset that we generally see. They are looking at cloud offerings to help them accelerate their product innovations.”
And unlike a traditional enterprise which is often dependent on vendors for its day-to-day operations, a digital native typically builds its capabilities in-house. Digital natives do rely on vendors too, albeit for different needs. Thakker said: “The reliance on external vendors still exists, but it's in the form of consultation and subject matter expertise. They have a very good understanding within the organization and can drive most of these initiatives internally.”
Join Searce and Google Cloud over dinner at the Shangri-La Singapore on 11 October 2022 to learn more about infrastructure modernization and how to build leading-edge infrastructure.
You can register your interest for this event here.
Get started today
If there is one advice that Thakker has for enterprises still on the fence about going ahead with their infrastructure modernization initiative, it would be to get started as soon as possible.
“You don’t need to wait for a multimillion-dollar investment to get started with your infrastructure modernization. It can be something as simple as a new application that you want to build, or that your vendor is tasked to develop – build it in the cloud or make use of microservices. We are not even asking you to transform an existing application but to start being cloud-native with your new applications,” he said.
Not doing anything is the most common mistake that Thakker says he sees. Beyond that would be a lack of business case development by the technology leadership team.
“Often, the technology leaders are forward-looking, but they create plans that fail to get the backing of business executives. To succeed, they need to paint a picture to the business teams of how they are going to get a return on their investment. Engage business stakeholders and seek their equal participation to understand the technology roadmap for a more compelling proposal that can be presented to the board.”
“There is no silver bullet to this. What we are attempting to do is digital transformation backed by infrastructure modernization to help businesses evaluate their landscape. We want to help businesses to get real business outcomes without doing stuff for the sake of doing it,” he summed up.
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/Melpomenem
Paul Mah
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends, where he report on the latest developments in data science and AI. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose.