by Julio Faerman
Times are currently hard on us all, and for many executives and entrepreneurs, business continuity is at stake. To survive and adapt to a new normal, companies will need to find new strategies and implement new tactics. Many processes and technologies that brought us here won’t make it forward. We’ll see old establishments suddenly gone and whole new kinds of opportunities become viable, and technology will keep playing a major role.
Clearly there are many ways builders can help businesses be more efficient and effective. However, we may need to take new actions to guide tech decisions, particularly under the pandemic. This post describes a few key strategies and relatable actions to help IT leverage cloud computing and keep not only functioning, but also improving to overcome.
Flatten the cost curve
Continuously adopting more of cloud computing can change IT costs and even the structure of business. However, it takes going further than the migration from on-premises to similar virtual servers. Changing architectures to leverage services saves both in technology and people. The more you offload to your cloud provider, the more you can focus on your business responsibilities.
We see this at work with the AWS Serverless set of services. They move compute, storage, databases and more responsibilities to managed services, such as Amazon Lambda, Amazon S3 and Amazon Aurora. This not only reduces the total cost of ownership, but lets your team work on more necessary tasks.
However, it does not stop there. Meanwhile, cloud providers keep improving these services to be more comprehensive and efficient. The economical and agility benefits of cloud computing goes beyond traditional “offshoring”. It means innovating together and tightly integrated, in tech and in business. In this way, the ability to integrate and share is directly related to the ability to adapt.
This is not restricted to a single cloud provider or set of service providers. There are managed services for all sorts of technology needs, including content distribution, machine learning, call center, satellite reception and infinities more. With them, you can not only build less, but build better. With them, we have been helping many customers select and integrate services to adapt to remote working, cloud operations, disaster recovery and more.
Innovate with confidence
With deep changes in business, we can also expect changes in software and application architectures. However, how can we confidently change to a new normal, without breaking the existing one? Beyond automated testing, how can we find “unknown unknowns” and demonstrate systems architectures work? The cloud is a key enabler of evolutionary architectures, but learning, improving and building experience to change confidently may take more time than we have now.
As AWS CEO Andy Jessy says, “there is no compression algorithm to experience”. But there are helpful tools to help us share and demonstrate, one of them is the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It is the compilation of knowledge from solution architects and other technical professionals all across AWS in their customers. As it is built upon so many different businesses and experiences, it does not contain prescriptive guidance. The framework is instead based on questions and guidelines, to help builders dive deeper. The core framework covers security, reliability, cost optimization, performance efficiency and operational excellence, with some extensions (“Lenses”) for specific scenarios such as Serverless, HPC, IoT and ML. Using and extending the AWS Well-Architected Framework to your business is a simple way to get essential bases covered, become aware of risks and technical debts and find possible improvements.
Build better partnerships
Beyond the technology, cloud computing is about helping each other focus forward and innovate together. We can exchange technology in a way that, at each layer, each of us is doing our best. With modern automation tools and platform APIs we can establish the contracts and mechanisms to integrate and do business and technology in a streamlined process, perhaps across many companies. However, under changing circumstances, partners need to be flexible to be successful.
With nubeGo Cloud Managed Services, we offer the level of managed services that is right for your organization today. You can give us the keys and let us manage the infrastructure, with complete transparency. Or manage yourself, with our advice and backup. Or a mix, working together towards sustainable solutions and partnerships.
There is no certain recipe to get everyone through, but we hope these principles in economy, innovation and partnerships help you get started. How are you managing to keep technology and business decisions going in such trying times?
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Julio