Amanda Blevins

I recently heard this at a conference: “If you haven’t started thinking about Digitalizing Business in November 2016, you are too late.” The speaker was dramatic for effect; But, I don’t completely disagree. Many enterprises I speak with might be in the early stages of focusing on Digital Transformation. Generally, it is something they have already been doing, sometimes unknowingly.

Almost every business today has at least one mobile app to reach their customers. It is much faster for me to board a plane, request a car, or order delivery food with an app. Recently I experienced ordering in restaurant with an app on an iPad mounted to the table. I usually prefer the human interaction that goes along with restaurant dining, but this type of interface makes sense for high traffic restaurants with quick diners, such as in an airport.

The above examples are about digitalizing business. In the case of the in restaurant ordering, this restaurant chose a company that sold a platform for the restaurant customers. This platform company had to think about not their own customers, but the customer’s customer to be successful. My ordering experience wasn’t completely intuitive, but I think it was good. I was able to navigate the menu in a reasonable amount of time, and still have plenty of time leftover to browse through the remaining money-making (shopping, travel, etc) apps while my food was prepared.

Let’s think through the steps the company took to create the iPad platform. First, they identified a gap in the market by watching trends and understanding their customers’ businesses. Next, they had to develop their application and provide it in a way that it can be quickly delivered and updated. This generally is done by building microservices-based applications that rely on application resiliency versus infrastructure redundancy. Because of this architecture, they are often run in public clouds and are known as cloud native applications. This is Mode Two of IT Applications and Operations. Mode One refers to running the traditional applications that are installed on Windows and Linux machines and have the standard architecture of Database Server, Application Server, and Web Server.

Digital Transformation is underway, and Bimodal IT is extinct. While there might be two different types of application architectures, IT should support both of them with the similar toolsets and processes. The idea of a different team to run a select few applications will stretch already thin resources and cause difficulties when it comes to standards, governance, and security. I speak with many IT leaders that already have business units and application owners who use public clouds without partnering with IT. This is dangerous as eventually IT will be responsible for these applications. When such an important group for architecture, operations, and security is left out of the planning, design, and implementation process, there will be gaps in the final solution. These gaps could potentially mean extreme downtime or large security holes in the applications.

There have been many instances in the history of technology where we have transitioned to different types of computing: Analog to Digital, Mainframe to Client-Server, Client-Server to SaaS-based, Data-Center to Cloud, and now Traditional Applications to Cloud Native Applications. Through any transition time, there will probably be two separate teams – one to get started and the other to continue with the previous technology. However, once the organization has started, it is imperative to bring everyone up to speed on the new way of doing things, as it will soon be the standard.

This past year, I’ve run across several misconceptions that hinder a company’s adoption of cloud. This affects their ability to impact the market in their industry. My blog has been the platform for sharing these barriers with the world. The latest blockage has been around third platform applications or Cloud Native Applications.

For the record, I believe Cloud Native Applications are absolutely the future. Enterprises do need to develop their latest solutions as a CNA. They will be left behind and unable to compete if they do not. If any company provides their solutions as a SaaS not only to their customer base, but also to others in the same industry as a platform for purchase, they will be well positioned to take the lead. However, this applies to one, two, or possibly three applications at most today. What happens to the other hundreds or thousands of platform two or legacy applications left behind?

These applications can still take advantage of many principles of cloud. They can leverage virtualization at all layers, not just for compute. They can run in multiple locations around due to hybrid cloud. Cloud management and monitoring will still apply because of the world that these applications now exist in. Older management and monitoring tools can no longer understand the abstraction the software-defined data center and hybrid cloud introduce. Legacy applications can be packaged and deployed in an automated fashion via the cloud management platform. Platform two applications can also be first class citizens in the hybrid cloud.

While developing cloud native applications and operationalizing the infrastructure team to support this brave new world is a huge task, building a hybrid cloud for the rest is slightly less daunting. The older applications do not need to change operating systems, development platforms, etc. to run in the cloud. The same virtualization technology that allows them to co-exist on physical servers is the foundation of cloud. The software-defined data center is the next step in this evolution. Virtualizing compute, network, and storage lowers the operational touches exponentially when deploying a new system. Enterprises that were previously uncomfortable with virtualization due to the black box nature of the network, can freely run their application on virtual machines with network and security virtualization protecting their applications with full transparency. Also, the security of a system is automated and instantiated when the application is deployed based on pre-determined profiles. Whether this application is running on-premise or in a public cloud, the same rules apply. This results in the same security throughout the hybrid cloud.

The solutions are out there to accomplish this. This isn’t a futures discussion. Adopting this style of operations is still no easy feat. When it comes to the trifecta of people, process, and technology, the first two continue to be the most challenging. However, if they are not equally considered and executed upon, any type of cloud project or IT transformation will not be successful. The incomprehensible dependency map of applications that exists today would only become more complicated by a partially implemented cloud solution. Cloud Native Applications are important for the future, but so are the other thousand running today