WHAT IS CLOUD-NATIVE AND THE TOP 5 REASONS TO ADOPT IT IN 2022
The last two years posed new challenges for businesses due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and companies had to adopt remote working models. A whopping 43% of companies even closed down temporarily. The ones that did survive, 78% of them took solace in cloud-native models hosting and technology.
With a CAGR rate of 25.7%, the cloud-native market size is expected to reach a value of $9.2 Billion by 2025. While they sound similar, cloud-native is the practice of working entirely on the cloud instead of building a data center and then migrating the data to the cloud, which is the cloud hosting methodology. So what exactly is the difference, and why is cloud-native the superior option?
What is the Difference between Cloud-Native and Cloud Hosting?
While the two terms both mention the word cloud, they are different in their approach. Cloud Hosting is more like traditional infrastructure in that you are renting server space, network infrastructure, or other resources from a company. This would be similar to the dedicated hosting model that was popular with small and medium-sized businesses in the early 2000’s. This is really no different than building your own data center where you occupy physical equipment — the difference is it’s someone else’s equipment and facilities.
Cloud-Native, on the other hand, embraces the virtualization of infrastructure and computing platforms into virtual machines with virtual-network connectivity, virtual firewalls, and other cloud-native infrastructure.
5 Reasons to Adopt Cloud-Native
As mentioned above, businesses have typically had a few options for hosting and managing their technology. On-Premise, Cloud Hosting, and Cloud-Native all have their benefits, depending on your business objectives and largely driven by regulatory compliance.
In this article, we’ll talk about 5 reasons why you should consider adopting a cloud-native approach to your technology ecosystem.
1. Reliability
On-Premise servers require a lot of consideration from power availability and backup batteries, network redundancy, cooling equipment, physical security, and more.
Cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP maintain robust data centers globally that help distribute your platforms across multiple data centers or zones, and across different physical equipment ensuring uptime and reliability is maintained.
2. Physical Space
As an organization grows, the challenges of expanding the operations also become extensive. While building data centers at all-new locations may seem easy, the original server is not expandable itself. As a result, data centers are not scalable and consume a lot of space and resources. According to a QTS report, there are 13 vulnerabilities that a data center poses. With cloud-native, the user has the flexibility to access the data in a more secure manner that is also easily scalable.
3. Speed to Market
Cloud-native allows you to develop the app/website in distributed systems and then bring it together when the need arises. This reduces the time to hit the market post-development, which is significantly longer with traditional development practice.
Furthermore, the additional resources are automatically decommissioned when the usage is complete, making the app/website light to operate and maintain in the long term. Add the adaptiveness with the Kubernetes environment, and cloud-native automatically becomes the go-to option for development.
4. Cloud-Native Enhances Security
Many data center migrations to the cloud do not come with security measures that are fully adaptive for cloud applications. This means that the pre-existing security measures with data centers are not as effective. This is solved with cloud-native; wherein all security measures are created directly only for the cloud. Furthermore, all of the security measures with cloud-native are compliance and regulation friendly, and hence can be deployed almost immediately.
5. Standard Data Center Hosting is Costlier
Most companies choose to build a data center when their data is too sensitive to be stored on a cloud-managed by somebody else. On average, it costs about $1,000 per square foot of area. And to top it off, they consume an enormous amount of power to work. An average data center costs $10–12 million per megawatt for an enterprise. With cloud-native, these costs can be reduced by up to 70%, with prices starting as low as $100,000.
Cloud-Native vs. Cloud Hosting of Traditional Enterprise Apps?
Cloud-native had seen its fair share of challenges since the cloud hosting model arrived before and was implemented at a broader scale, with 31% of public enterprises stating it imperative. However, in 2021, cloud hosting is becoming a thing of the past due to the infrastructure requirements and maintenance costs. The following are the broad differences between cloud-native and cloud hosting:
As the table reveals, the cloud-native model adopts the advantages of cloud hosting, drops the costs and requirements, and further builds on that premise, making it a more all-rounder model for the development of apps and websites.
Conclusion: Why Should you Migrate to Cloud-Native?
With 70% of US companies already adopting cloud-native architecture and a complete transformation by 2025, it is only a matter of time. Cloud-native packs all the features of its predecessors like higher uptime, lower carbon footprints and adds the benefits of reduced overhead costs and faster implementation.
To top it off, it is seamlessly accessible through remote locations for COVID-19 working models and yet manages to adhere to all security measures to prevent data breaches. It is thus worthwhile to migrate to cloud-native.
