3 Ways to Rapidly Achieve Cloud Scalability for Digital Transformation - Stefanini

3 Ways To Rapidly Achieve Cloud Scalability For Digital Transformation

With the right cloud strategy, your business can quickly achieve digital transformation. Learn how cloud scalability can help you reach your goals and more!

Achieving digital transformation is on everyone’s minds these days. Yet, only 14 percent of companies that have launched digital transformation initiatives have seen sustained and substantial performance improvements.

There are several reasons behind this phenomena. For instance, outdated technology environments are expensive to upgrade while some rigid infrastructures aren’t built to enable robust analytics.

While cloud-based solutions can reduce or even eliminate some of these issues, a different business-technology model is needed to fully take advantage of the cloud. Bring new capabilities to market faster, innovate, and scale efficiently – leading to true digital transformation in the process.

The future is in the clouds. Get the scoop from our infographic!

What is Cloud Scalability?

Something that is ‘scalable’ can be expanded, so it only follows that cloud scalability, according to Lucidchart, refers to how well your system can react and adapt to changing demands. Any company experiencing growth needs to be able to quickly add resources without compromising service quality or without interruptions happening. At the same time, if demand on resources increases or decreases, the company needs to quickly and effectively adjust their system so they only pay for resources they need.

Types of Scalability in Cloud Computing

There is more to cloud scalability than adding or removing resources on an as-needed basis. To reap the full benefits of scalable cloud, familiarize yourself with these terms:

  • Cloud elasticity – this term refers to how efficiently your cloud services are able to add or remove resources on-demand. Companies need to consider how elastic their cloud services are because they need to ensure that your clients and employees can automatically and seamlessly access the resources they need.
  • Vertical scaling – also known as ‘scaling up,’ vertical scaling occurs when a single resource is upgraded, such as adding more data storage space to a server. To install these updates in physical, on-premise data centers, the server must be shut down.
  • Horizontal scaling – this occurs when ‘building out’ a system with additional components, like adding more memory to a server by linking it with other servers. With horizontal scaling, additional hardware resources, which can decrease redundancy, can be added to the linked servers with minimal impact.
  • Diagonal scaling – combining vertical scaling with horizontal scaling allows for growth within the existing server until it reaches capacity. Then, that server can be cloned, which allows the business to deal with a lot of requests and traffic at the same time.
  • Autoscaling – when the cloud is auto-scaled, companies are able to automatically manage different types of scalability in the cloud, which allows for consistent performance regardless of the current demand on resources.
  • Virtual machines (VMs) – VMs can be used to scale the cloud up or down because resources can easily be added to VMs, VMs can be moved to different servers with more resources, and hosting VMs on server clusters can enable the sharing of resources.

Is the public cloud, private cloud or hybrid cloud right for your business? Read our guide to learn more!

How Scalability is Achieved in Cloud Computing?

Cloud adoption is a major priority for most CIOs and CTOs, with successful enterprises treating cloud migration as a business-technology transformation. According to McKinsey, achieving scalability in cloud computing is contingent upon three things:

1.      Focus cloud investments in business domains where cloud platforms can enable increased revenues and improved margins – much of the value the cloud brings to businesses comes from increased agility, innovation, and resilience provided to the business through continued acceleration. By embedding reusability and composability into the cloud adoption model, investment in modernizing can be quickly scaled across the organization. When it comes to efficient scalability, the cloud gives companies the ability to automatically address rising customer usage by scaling out services in seconds instead of the weeks it typically takes to add more on-premises servers. COVID-19 drew special attention to this capability when the massive shift to digital channels resulted in abrupt and unprecedented need.

2.      Select a technology, sourcing, and migration model that aligns with economic and risk constraintswhen making decisions about cloud architecture, companies need to tread lightly. Unfortunately, choosing the wrong technology and making incorrect sourcing decisions shine the spotlight on compliance concerns, execution success, cybersecurity, and vendor risk. By choosing the correct ‘as-a-service’ option for different branches of the business, as well as which services should be indexed in the cloud, companies can enable greater agility, flexibility, scalability, and sustainability with increased productivity.

3.      Change operating models to capture cloud value to smooth scalability, the cloud operating model needs to follow a number of principles, including:

a.      Shifting from IT projects to products, which focuses teams on delivering a finished working product.

b.      Applying developer journeys to workflows with modern tooling to drive organic adoption and sustainable velocity.

c.      Frequently interacting with business leaders to make quick decisions.

d.      Ensuring the cloud is fully software defined, automated, and abstracted.

e.      Redesigning cyber programs, updating policies, and modernizing controls to build security seamlessly into the cloud.

f.       Adopting iterative ways of working and codification across traditional infrastructure, networking, and security teams.

g.      Embedding cloud knowledge into each agile tribe and squad.

h.      Train team members to act as software engineers who can bounce between multiple technology stacks to deliver integrative cloud solutions.

i.       To prevent cloud adoption-induced security, resilience, and compliance concerns, develop a clear-eyed view on risk.

Let’s work together to generate new transformative ideas that leverage the cloud. Learn more here!

Stefanini’s Agile Approach to the Cloud

Stefanini’s cloud o­fferings are designed to accelerate your enterprise’s cloud adoption and maturity journey. Whether your primary business drivers are to be cost effective, ensure agility, manage complexity or deliver scalability, Stefanini customizes its bouquet of cloud o­fferings to enterprises’ specific contexts and needs. As Partner Clouds with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, we design our end-to-end cloud o­fferings to help enterprises strategize, plan, and execute their cloud initiatives.

Using an iterative Agile methodology, we design the cloud initiative for periodic, incremental, tangible business outcomes, driving cloud environment transformation and progressively reducing the gap between enterprises’ current and desired states.

Is your enterprise ready to optimize cloud scalability? We have a plan for you. Contact us today to learn more!

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