To keep pace with the ever-changing digital landscape, today’s enterprises are trying to move to the cloud as fast as possible. As more and more companies move toward implementing cloud native and open source technologies to enable agility and increased time-to-value, the operational impacts to the business can be significant. While these challenges can cause serious setbacks and complexity, if an organization addresses them from the very beginning as part of its cloud strategy, it can overcome any trial.
The following are top challenges enterprises may face when rapidly adopting cloud native technologies.
Intense Competition and Market Pressure
As businesses fight to keep their competitive edge, they are feeling significant pressure to adopt new initiatives to achieve greater business velocity. New initiatives such as data analytics, data science and cloud computing are being leveraged by organizations to gain an advantage while disrupting how businesses have traditionally been performed.
Lack of Maturity and Interoperability of Many Open Source Technologies
Understanding the cloud landscape is a critical component for kicking off any digital transformation project, but the state of each technology varies significantly. Because so many of these technologies are open source, getting a true understanding of maturity can be challenging. Some solutions are in very early stages with low commercial adoption and support, while other solutions are at a later stage and much more mature.
Unfortunately, most of these technologies were not built to ensure interoperability from the beginning and the efforts of jamming together multiple disparate solutions from the cloud native landscape is complex and rife with challenges. This is why it is imperative that modern organizations ensure its solutions are enterprise-grade, ready to scale and nearly fool-proof to challenges.
No Clear Best Practices or Architectural Standards
Because many of these new technologies lack maturity, the right information and proper documentation is scattered and difficult to distill. How can developers trust if an application is safe to include in their implementation if they are unsure whether documentation is correct and up-to-date? Since many of these open source technologies do not have well-defined best practices or architectural standards, implementing these solutions can be a huge business risk.
Limited Choices for Leveraging External Domain Expertise and Support
In order to ensure that organizations’ Day 2 operations go smoothly, they need the right expertise to provide guidance and support. Unfortunately, because so many of these technologies are new, there is a very limited pool of talent—both internally and externally—organizations can pull from. Organizations need the right technical support and services to operate and scale effectively, and with limited options available, the complexities of long term success can be a huge barrier.
The Complexity of Managing Ongoing Operations
Implementation is just the beginning, what really enables businesses to be successful with any digital transformation initiative is tackling ongoing Day 2 operations. This means ensuring that technologies work well together, the team understands how to leverage the technologies and organizations have an operational readiness plan for continued development and ongoing improvement. So many businesses focus their attention on what happens before production and as a result, success is not always achieved.
When beginning a cloud native journey, enterprises must be conscious of the inherent challenges rapid adoption poses. Competition, lack of maturity and best practices, limited choices and complexity can all complicate an enterprise’s journey to the cloud. Awareness of potential problems can help stop issues before they arise while easing the transition to the cloud.
