3 key elements to a successful cloud-native digital strategy
Salim Khouri
Director of Global Solutions Engineering
There are three key elements you need to consider in order to have a successful cloud-native digital strategy for your global enterprise. Let's take a look at each of them below.
1. Ensure your cloud security is watertight
With Covid-19 pushing digital transformation and remote working into lightspeed, businesses will need to contend with the fact that the majority of their workflows will be taking place on cloud-based networks.
In the good old days, security meant building a dome around your MPLS-based head office, or data center. Now security needs to contend with the fact that the majority of the workforce will be accessing, sending and receiving data, from multiple locations, on changing connections, and with various devices.
The security dome is now no longer your office, it’s potentially anywhere in the world.
Cloud-first networking is based on the public internet, and packet loss, latency issues and broken encryption tunnels are all risks that need to be taken seriously.
Just because your employees aren’t physically in the office doesn’t mean they are not still targets for hackers and malicious actors to get to your enterprise data. That’s where SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) comes in.
By combining a plethora of different security approaches in a software-defined manner, SASE and the Zero Trust Network Access approach can protect your data by moving your security perimeter from the head office or data center to the various devices and access points your employees use, inside and outside the office.
Smart software-defined security approaches like SASE are easily scalable, can reduce costs, and respond dynamically to the needs of your business.
2. Optimize your cloud
Software-defined cloud-based networks use the flexibility of the internet to its maximum potential by routing your information between different parts of your business in the most efficient way possible.
But the cloud is the cloud, and the internet is also just the internet – both subject to best-effort services, built on legacy routing algorithms. You’ll want some form of cloud optimization to bring order from the internet’s unpredictable network underlay.
Expereo Enhanced Internet uses AI to adjust this routing dynamically, moment-by-moment, based upon the data needs of your workforce, therefore ensuring your data reaches its destination in the fastest and most resilient way possible.
With Azure, private data centers, SaaS, all thrown into the mix, your CIO’s may find that they have more than one cloud to deal with. Much like the impact, the world’s best soccer coaches can have on a group of players, an intelligent underlay will synchronize all of these moving data parts into a well-oiled machine.
3. Prepare your business operations for lightspeed
The cloud’s horizontal approach to data opens up a number of exciting opportunities for software deployment.
Low code applications are tearing down previously clear lines between product creators and product users. Citizen development is also on the rise. Artificial intelligence is now able to look at the way software is used across the network, and optimize that usage, improving performance and productivity.
Businesses can now deploy faster, more demanding software applications and deliver better products to their customers.
Companies need to make sure their IT departments and overall IT governance structures are ready to meet the demands of these new ways of working. Horizontal data means horizontal workflows requiring horizontal governance. Don’t turn a blind eye to these changes; harness them.
If you’re going to live in the cloud, bring your operations along for the ride.
When your business relies heavily on the cloud, there’s nothing worse than a dropped internet connection.
Expereo bridges that service gap by establishing streamlined, global internet management systems that will ensure smooth and secure access to your business data in the farthest reaches of the globe.
The costs and long waiting times taken to establish new offices remain one of the biggest complaints for expanding global businesses. With the above innovations, now all that’s needed is an internet connection. Is your business ready to move that fast?