In research on the evolution of cloud, commissioned by HCLTech, 82% of companies say they believe GenAI will have a positive impact on enterprise productivity, efficiency and cost of doing business. This is creating unprecedented demand for new GenAI solutions. Organizations are modernizing legacy software applications using cloud-native practices to align with current business needs. Why? Because GenAI aspirations are creating a need for speed! Cloud-native practices enable rapid development and deployment of applications, often using modern cloud platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Rearchitecting, rebuilding or rewriting apps take full advantage of cloud-native practices. Platform engineering is a critical enabler for cloud-native practices.
Unlike traditional monolithic applications, cloud-native apps are designed to be flexible, resilient and scalable, leveraging the full potential of cloud computing to meet changing business needs. According to the research, Cloud Evolution 2024: Mandate to Modernize, 78% of organizations agree that cloud-native approaches drive efficiency and scalability improvements. By embracing cloud-native principles, organizations can accelerate innovation, reduce time-to-market and improve operational efficiency.
Unpacking the shift to cloud-native applications
Scalability, resilience and the need for speed are driving the increasing numbers of cloud-native applications. Traditional monolithic applications often struggle to keep pace with the dynamic demands of today's digital landscape. In contrast, cloud-native applications are designed to leverage the inherent advantages of cloud computing environments.
Figure 1: Four pillars of cloud-native development
Cloud-native architectures consist of microservices, containerization and orchestration technologies like Kubernetes. Breaking large applications into smaller independent deployable components or microservices enables the ease and speed of making change. Microservices and containers, a modular approach to application development, enhances resilience — if one component fails it doesn’t impact the entire application. DevOps, a pillar of cloud-native development, accelerates deployment cycles, enabling organizations to respond quickly to macroeconomic changes and competitive pressures like pricing.
Platform engineering: Unlocking the value of cloud-native applications
Platform engineering is an emerging discipline providing the necessary infrastructure, tools and processes that support the cloud-native approach. Organizations that report building out platform engineering are also more likely to agree that cloud-native applications are superior to monolithic applications. Platform engineering provides the underlying infrastructure, tools and services required to support modern software development and deployment practices. Engineering platforms provide a robust and scalable foundation for developing, deploying and operating cloud-native applications. In the HCLTech cloud research for 2024, 76% of organizations report that they have built a platform engineering team.
Unlocking the full potential of cloud-native applications requires a fundamental shift in how we approach platform engineering. To truly harness the benefits of these modern architectures, it's essential to approach platform engineering with a product mindset. This means putting developers at the center of the decision-making process, understanding their challenges and requirements, as well as the operations teams and other stakeholders. This insight drives the design, development and improvement of platforms. Furthermore, adopting this mindset aligns developers and platform engineering with the business’s strategic goals and objectives. Organizations with effective platform engineering are confident about their ability to develop cloud-native applications, unlocking the benefits of scale, resilience and accelerated delivery.
Figure 2: Key benefits of cloud-native applications
Success stories
Organizations will continue to choose cloud-native practices and evolve their skills and engineering platforms to modernize their application portfolio. These examples illustrate the value of cloud-native practices enabled by platform engineering:
- Enhancing scalability in retail: This company’s legacy application failed during peak demand. By rebuilding the legacy application, the company realized significant improvements. The new application enabled them to avoid downtime, giving them the ability to serve more customers, increasing sales and overall customer satisfaction.
- Strengthening resilience in finance: A financial services firm needed to enhance the resilience of its trading platform to ensure uninterrupted service during market fluctuations. By adopting cloud-native practices and an engineering platform, they achieved higher availability and faster recovery times. This enabled them to protect their brand reputation and gain a competitive edge in the industry.
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Accelerating delivery in healthcare : A healthcare provider needed to accelerate the delivery of new features and updates to its patient management system. By leveraging cloud-native practices and utilizing platform engineering, they redesigned and rearchitected the patient management system and reduced deployment times from weeks to days. With this agility, they can respond to regulatory changes and ultimately improve patient care.
Hari Sadarahalli, Corporate Vice President and Global Head, Engineering and R&D at HCLTech, explains: “As enterprises continue to accelerate their digital transformation agendas, they are increasingly focused on platform-driven business models as a cornerstone to drive innovation and growth. Robust and scalable platforms help enterprises engineer secure, reliable and optimized cloud-native applications that can scale rapidly as the business grows without compromising on security, reliability, availability and a seamless and secure cloud experience.”
Take the next step with HCLTech
Are you ready to unlock the full potential of cloud-native practices and platform engineering? Start by assessing your organization's current capabilities and pinpoint areas for improvement. Our research report, Cloud Evolution 2024: Mandate to Modernize, based on insights from over 500 C-level and senior executives, will provide valuable perspectives for your journey.
The future is becoming increasingly cloud centric as businesses respond to the mandate to modernize. HCLTech provides a catalog of cloud services for application modernization, intelligent data management, cloud governance and security and FinOps. Thousands of certified engineers knowledgeable on every cloud platform are ready to partner with you to transform your standards, adopt new technologies and expose your staff to new ways of working like cloud-native and platform engineering.
We help you stay ahead of the curve with our Cloud Native Labs, GenAI Labs and GenAI Industry Solutions. We are a services company with engineering at our core — ready to jump-start your GenAI projects. Contact our industry experts and take the next step to the modern enterprise.
