Category: Blogs

Introduction

When the concept of IoT was first introduced, it caught the imagination and took the world by storm. The ability of devices to build an ecosystem to connect and exchange data was unheard of but there seemed to be immense promise to explore. But what was touted to be a roaring success in the world of insights and business decision-making soon witnessed a downfall – for reasons aplenty!

So, why did IoT suddenly begin to receive bad press? Why didn’t IoT solutions deliver as much value as expected? And why are things about to turn around? Read on to find out.

IoT’s Downward Trend – A Flashback

As the business landscape got increasingly competitive, IoT brought about a ray of hope for organizations looking to operate their business in a more integrated fashion. By connecting disparate systems and devices into an integrated ecosystem, IoT offered many benefits – from real-time visibility to data-driven insights for better decision-making, improved operational efficiency to better end-user experiences. The technology opened doors to a ton of new and improved business opportunities.

But despite the many promises, IoT hasn’t been able to disrupt customer experiences, business models, and industries – as it should have. There are many roadblocks to adoption (and usage) that restrict companies from getting the most from their IoT journey:

• The inability to build a strong business case for IoT implementation is a major reason why companies steer clear of the technology, with many having trouble understanding how IoT applies to their business.
• Security – or lack thereof – has been another reason why many companies have stayed away from IoT. The fear of devices in the IoT ecosystem getting hacked and leading to a slew of cybersecurity issues has been a global concern.
• Companies that already find their tech ecosystem complicated are extremely wary of embracing IoT until they are sure their current IT environments can handle the additional complexity that IoT devices bring about.
• Lack of the right skill set and interoperability issues with the current infrastructure is another challenge that comes in the way of successful IoT adoption. IoT solutions require skilled and experienced professionals who fully understand the technology, so they can deploy, set up, maintain, and pivot solutions to meet evolving business demands.
• Many IoT projects derail because of a lack of budget. Integrating sensors on devices, gathering data, and unearthing insights costs far more money than people realize – causing many businesses to struggle to gather sufficient cash for their smart projects.
• For IoT devices to deliver immediate insights, a robust infrastructure that offers uninterrupted network connection with high bandwidth and low latency is critical. But this hasn’t been easy to establish.
• With the total installed base of IoT devices worldwide projected to amount to 9 billion unitsby 2025, the difficulties being faced by businesses in data collection and analysis have been a real challenge – how does one make this humongous volume of data meaningful?

Fast-Forward – Why Things Are About to Turn Around

Despite the many challenges organizations have faced in achieving the expected ROI from their IoT investments, innumerable use cases of IoT are expected to emerge. Right from access to real-time data for actionable insights to remote monitoring for performance intelligence and health analytics of the assets, IoT is expected to play a massive role in preventing downtime, tracking assets, and preventing the failure of machines or equipment.

So, what does the future look like for IoT? Will IoT deliver on its promises? Well, we surely believe things are changing for the better. Let’s look at key enablers that will be responsible for turning around IoT success:

• The rise in Industrial IoT adoption across geographies is a testament to the huge potential possessed by IoT. IIoT connections are expected to reach 37 billionby 2025, causing smart manufacturing to represent 60% of global IoT connections.
• The widespread growth of smart everything – from homes to vehicles and cities – will cause the IoT market to boom, changing how humans interact with their surroundings and with each other.
• At the same time, the steady price decline of sensors and related communication technology has led to easier adoption of IoT solutions, resulting in quicker innovations across industries.
• With the coming year(s) expected to bring true high-speed 5G experiences, IoT devices will be in high demand to enable faster transmission speeds, better security, and lower latency.
• As the worldwide edge computing market grows to $274 billionby 2025, IoT devices will bring data processing closer to the source, reducing any friction or latency within the IoT ecosystem.
• An exciting wave of innovative IoT applications is set to emerge, transforming human-to-machine interactivity like never before.
• In the future, IoT will bring about sensory experiences never experienced before, enabling new opportunities across remote learning, surgery, and repair.
• At the same time, immersive mixed reality applications that set the stage for the metaverse will exploit IoT technology to transform user interfaces and make the virtual world seem as real as possible.
• With so many new use cases for IoT emerging, there is a widespread decline in the costs of sensors. Simultaneously, organizations are devoting significant budget and time to upskilling the workforce, so they can cater to these new use cases and strengthen the IoT ecosystem.

The Way Forward with IoT

IoT has, over the years, emerged as a key technology enabler for digital transformation, proving to be a growth driver for businesses across industries and domains. As businesses of all sizes in every industry looked to embrace the technology, they faced several roadblocks in the development and integration of their IoT solutions. Although IoT led to a revolution of sorts, the technology failed to deliver the level of disruption expected. But all that is about to change!

The level of transformation IoT has brought until now (and is expected to in the future) has been exceptional. Today, IoT plays a huge role in optimizing businesses, causing several businesses across the world— big and small – to exploit the technology to stay ahead of the curve. As technologies like 5G and edge computing grow, the demand for IoT is going to be massive.

If you are looking to leverage the technology to enhance your business outcomes, we can help. At Pratiti, we have exceptional IoT platform development expertise and can build easily deployable solutions, so you can derive real value from your IoT investments.

Choose from our range of IoT consulting, design, development, testing, and support capabilities and cater to your specific business use case with ease and efficiency. Contact us today!

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Introduction

Businesses globally have witnessed and experienced extreme market uncertainty post the COVID-19 pandemic. In the new normal, organizations across industries are looking for ways to cut down operational costs, retain competent talent, and increase productivity. However, managing large teams to accelerate sophisticated initiatives like those associated with product development can prove expensive and risky.

That’s precisely why employers are constantly looking for alternative methods to fill gaps and ensure the continuity of development projects. These methods can avoid overburdening existing staff and boost operational efficiency.

Along these lines, the two of the most popular solutions are staff augmentation and outsourcing. Both provide various benefits and help companies as external resources to fulfill their business requirements. Understanding the differences, pros, and cons of staff augmentation and outsourcing can help companies align their business goals and deploy resources adequately for their product development initiatives.

What Is Staff Augmentation?

To reduce costs and skip hiring formalities, many startups and companies across sectors are now working with external resources. Thanks to staff augmentation, companies now have a strategy in place to curb their expenditures associated with recruitment, payroll services, and project implementation.

Staff augmentation allows the hiring of skilled workers for development projects and meeting business expectations. It is a popular method to hire temporary employees as well as keep complete control over the projects. It has also become a lifeline for IT and product development for start-ups who wish to expand efficiently in less time. It also offers flexibility to start-ups by providing long-term and short-term contracts. This is often an easy model to understand even for those who have never worked with a vendor partner before since it’s usually all about finding the right set of people to fill specific gaps in the talent rolls. Apart from being a smart hiring choice, staff augmentation provides numerous other benefits.

Pros of Staff Augmentation

• Greater project control:Companies can have higher control over the augmented staff and its contribution towards the company tasks, compared to other outsourcing methods.
• Cost-efficient hiring strategy:Start-ups can deploy staff as and when required instead of hiring permanently. In addition, additional costs related to office rent, lease, and benefits are reduced. Hence, there is a reduction in the overall cost of hiring.
• High productivity:As augmented staff is focused and dedicated to a particular development project, businesses can realize higher productivity and enhanced outcomes.
• Access to the right talent:With staff augmentation, businesses are better equipped to land competent workers with specialized skills and quickly upskill the existing department.
• High flexibility:Companies can design working schedules, payment, and even technology implementations as per business requirements. In addition, project timelines and schedules can be accelerated without any prior notice to augmented staff.

Also Read: A Non-tech Founder Guide on Outsourcing Product Development

Challenges of Staff Augmentation

Though staff augmentation provides flexibility and high control over projects, there are certain limitations that must be addressed:

• High risk of team conflicts:Bringing augmented staff can create conflicts with existing in-house staff. Hence, the familiarity of augmented staff with company requirements, goals, and culture is important.
• Additional training expenses:Though the augmented staff is skilled, they presumably lack insight into past projects and workflows. Hence, they need to be trained and oriented regarding company goals, objectives, and vision which can increase the training expenses of the organization.
• Management issues:Staff augmentation increases management responsibilities. As the augmented staff is recruited into the organization, management is responsible for providing office space, perks, and benefits, thus, adding additional burden.

What Does Outsourcing Mean?

Outsourcing is a broader concept in comparison to augmentation and involves practices such as offloading tasks, deliverables, responsibilities, and even entire departments to an external point of contact or company. This concept is especially looked upon by various IT and product development companies for outsourcing dedicated project teams.

Outsourcing can cover software-related services, such as support, project management, analysis, and design for IT services. Almost 90% of small business owners in the US planned to outsource their tasks in the year 2022. Here are the benefits of the outsourcing model.

Pros of the Outsourcing Model

• Reduced management responsibilities:The management responsibilities are outsourced, and hence there are no additional overhead costs incurred due to additional employees.
• Controlled costs:One of the most important benefits is cost savings. Outsourcing the team and software development project reduces the cost of recruiting, payrolls, insurance, and healthcare insurance. In addition, with training and skill development being taken care of by the outsourcing service provider, companies can gain access to skilled talent from various locations without investing heavily.
• Scalability of operations:Outsourcing simplifies scaling and downsizing resources for any product development project. By deploying resources as per requirement, outsourcing ensures greater flexibility in comparison to staff augmentation.
• Streamlined results: With an outsourcing team responsible for achieving business deliverables and goals, the desired outcomes are realized in time.

Also Read: 5 Ways an Outsourced Product Development Partner Can Add Value to Your MVP Development

Challenges of Outsourcing

Though outsourcing is highly beneficial for companies, there are certain challenges while adopting this business solution.

• Less control:The main deliverables and objectives are outsourced and hence challenging to align with the internal working systems. The outsourcing provider controls the actual execution and planning.
• Finding the right resources: Finding the right outsourcing provider can be challenging – especially when the development requirements are unique.
• Security challenges: Following strict cyber security protocols and signing NDAs is important for companies before outsourcing their products or teams.

Staff Augmentation or Outsourcing? What to Choose?

For most businesses, saving monetary resources and having flexible options for expansion are of immense priority. To last longer in the business race, they must stick to their schedules and provide timely and precise results. An expert and skilled team is required to achieve the same. Hence, outsourcing proves to be the best course of action as compared to staff augmentation.

Outsourcing is a successful strategy to save both time and money. Outsourcing projects offshore also provides unique benefits and growth opportunities to growing companies. It allows them to attract and employ talented and skilled professionals without investing in their training and development.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to the choice of the outsourcing partner. Be it staff augmentation or outsourcing, it’s essential that the service provider is adept at helping you build a capable team for your product development initiatives. For more information about how an outsourcing partner can help, contact us.

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Introduction

A 2022 study by The Linux Foundation and Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH) revealed that open-source software makes up about 70 to 90% of a modern software solution.

From speed and cost-efficiency to collaboration and immense resource access, open-source is a valuable asset for any development team, especially in today’s world, where applications need to be scalable and be launched fast.

Why Should Open-Source Be Used for Application Development?

From an overall development perspective, it’s not all about the software but also the community of developers who are actively committed to open-source. Businesses can benefit from their expertise in every aspect of software development and get invaluable insights. As a matter of fact, this holistic advantage has previously been documented in a McKinsey-led study.

In 2020, the consulting giant, while surveying senior executives across 440 large enterprises, devised an index called “Developer Velocity Index (DVI)” to weigh the most important factors contributing to Developer Velocity. Here’s what they found:

• Organizations with a high DVI score experienced development acceleration thanks to open-source adoption.
• Companies with high revenue growth had a 3X influence on innovation post-open-source adoption.
• Companies with a high DVI score showcased 36% higher open-source adoption.
• Companies with high open-source adoption were able to encourage more “collaboration and participation” and improve “how code is shared internally.”

All these insights are very good reasons why organizations should leverage open-source to accelerate innovation across their application development initiatives. Here are some of the benefits of open-source development:

Great Potential for Cost Savings

A host of application development initiatives are plagued with the issue of high costs incurred along the process. The good news is that open-source offers a non-stop cost-saving potential, a winning combination for any business, especially those that find it challenging to get new programs up in time for customers. Here’s how:

• These components can be seen as “readymade” elements that can be plugged into the application, increasing the velocity of software development.
• There’s free community support that companies can leverage, which is a cost-effective alternative source of commercial support.
• There’s also more room to innovate with new features and bug fixes, which often create substantial savings. This is especially beneficial when developers want to experiment and substantiate the effectiveness of their solutions to people higher up in the management chain.
• There are also no hidden costs for companies in terms of licensing, maintenance, or support.

Access to an Extensive Range of Tools & Resources

Open-source is powered by an immensely effective peer review system, which keeps the source code “living.” A “living code” means that it is constantly improved upon by the open-source community, which as a matter of fact, is proactive in nailing bugs, as well as adding new features through input from a variety of different developers and resource specialists. This robust process of maintenance, bug detection, and fixes allows businesses to enjoy constant updates across their project.

The good thing is that businesses can consult software and cloud vendors to harden their solutions’ security infrastructure. The vendors are able to harden the security without having to do away with the community-build code. All in all, a lot of different expert perspectives come to the fore that the developers are equipped with the adequate resources to craft applications that are jam-packed with all the necessary functionalities – and at the same time, aren’t cluttered with a bunch of functionalities that can bog down the app.

This further translates to the:

• Ability to customize and extend solutions
• Ability to seamlessly integrate into the wider ecosystem
• Ability to create value-added applications that are well-equipped with the latest capabilities and feature sets
• Ability to keep the application development initiativesadherent to customer requirements

But there are challenges as well.

Challenges of Using Open-Source

No Vendor Lock-in Can Also Be a Problem

Well, if there’s the flexibility of switching services, there’s also the risk of non-accountability. No legal team is responsible if service proves to be inadequate or ineffective.

Security Threat Still Looms

There’s always a high probability that not all security facets have been addressed within the open-source code. The testing might not have been rigorous enough to provide extensive security coverage.

Achieving the Desired Quality Is Subjective

Although the collaborative, community-driven system offers a lot of potential for quality assurance, it’s not always easy to gauge the quality of the software component under development. It’s a subjective process and often varies from one project to another. For example, not many people will be able to contribute to a project that involves niche components or frameworks.

Consider this; the aforementioned Linux Foundation-LISH study also revealed that 136 developers contributed to 80% of the code for the top 50 packages that were under examination. That lends a lot of weight to the quality factor and the possibility of the scarcity of resources to address and improve it.

How To Avoid These Challenges? (The Best Practices)

Surely, getting the most out of open-source technologies should be at the top of any business priority list. But for that to happen, they must ward off the above challenges by following these best practices:

Secure the Solution

Tackling the security challenges requires businesses to implement the following measures:

• Use automation tools to identify vulnerabilities, prioritize high-risk vulnerabilities, schedule patch deployments, and assess risks.
• Keep abreast of the security patch releases that are released within the community whenever a vulnerability is identified.

License the Application

Open-source licensing governs how the application code can be modified and distributed. It defines a legal relationship between the author of the code and its users. This works to reduce the problems related to accountability, advances the collaboration culture, allows for easy auditing, and makes debugging seamless.

Engage with Expert Advisors

The collaborative approach to open-source development brings in the notion that it is a community-driven process. However, it’s challenging to harness this power, considering the many options that businesses need to traverse to meet their requirements. So, it’s a best practice to engage with trusted advisor firms that have established themselves in the open-source space for years and will be able to help you navigate through the best practices.

At Pratiti Tech, we define this support in terms of helping businesses in hardening their application’s security posture, identifying and fixing vulnerabilities, offering constant maintenance and support, handling risk mitigation in terms of licensing and organizational policies, and more.

Talk to our experts to learn more.

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Introduction

Customizations, vertical shift, horizontal shift, changing business needs, application services, data, etc. — a host of factors come into play while making a move to the cloud. Besides, the business must decide on infrastructural control — for instance, a high-end dedicated cloud offers maximum control, whereas low-code, no-code, and serverless platforms offer minimum control.

According to Gartner, cloud services investment will reach $494.7 billion by the end of 2022. However, to realize success with the cloud, businesses must understand the abstraction level of the cloud and maintain a clear understanding of the options available. This is where choosing between cloud-native and cloud-agnostic SaaS products becomes challenging. A thorough understanding of them is essential for making the right choice.

What Is Cloud-Native?

Cloud-native architecture leverages components native to a specific cloud service provider to build the applications. The developers are freed from the burden of building and managing infrastructure components and can focus on application architecture. Since the application leverages stable managed services provided by the cloud service provider ( such as database, container, virtual computation) , they are able to achieve the elasticity , scalability, flexibility and resilience , which are primary advantages of the cloud.

Cloud-native products enable organizations to develop and run scalable apps in private, public, and hybrid clouds. Prominent features included in this approach are containers, microservices, service meshes, declarative APIs, and immutable infrastructure.

Whereas some businesses maintain their private cloud, enterprises usually stick to third-party, proprietary platform providers such as Google Cloud, AWS, Oracle, Alibaba Cloud, or Azure.

Sophisticated plugins and features with managed services stability in these proprietary cloud platforms are beneficial for software teams. Application managers and developers need not focus on backend integration and configuration concerns.

However, it’s noteworthy that developers can only design applications and services that function within that specific cloud platform. Although some platforms retain cross-functionality, such as multi-cloud catches, porting such applications to a new platform requires intensive application rebuilds and code refactoring.

Pros

• Scalability:Cloud-native makes it easier to scale systems up and down to meet organizational needs.
• Performance:Overall, the system’s performance increases because of smaller segments focusing on individual components.
• Resilience:Resilience depends on the microservices of cloud-native environments. As it stands, any small component issue or failure does not impact the entire ecosystem.

Cons

• High Upfront Costs:Upfront costs are relatively high for developing and deploying applications having unique features.
• Portability:It is usually challenging to move applications to respective clouds, which makes portability difficult.
• Monitoring Confronts: Small services require micro-management, which creates conflict.
• Data Management & Security: With so many small parts moving around, security, network communication across services, and data loss concerns are complex to address.

What Is Cloud-Agnostic?

Cloud-agnostic is a set of platforms, tools, or applications compatible with all cloud infrastructure. Most importantly, these applications can be easily moved to and from various cloud environments without operational hazards. Cloud-agnostic tools work equally well on Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google, which indicates uninterrupted portability.

Regardless of the movement, results remain the same as tools are not dependent on the custom features of platforms. It also offers flexibility and scalability with options to customize and meet specific requirements of the business.

The cloud-agnostic architecture emphasizes designing applications running seamlessly in all cloud environments. As elucidated above, cloud-agnostic services and applications do not depend on the regulated toolchains of any cloud platform. Rather, they integrate seamlessly with a customized combination of open-source and vendor-provided tools. Although it increases standardized application management and tool compatibility risk factors, it also liberates businesses from typical vendor lock-ins.

The cloud-agnostic approach offers freedom and flexibility to businesses. However, building an app independent of vendors requires more work in developing and integrating features, which is often tedious.

Pros

• Portability:Portability is one of the major advantages of Cloud-agnostic products. Programs work independently of functions. Hence, they are easily movable.
• Consistency:Businesses can leverage an array of features that maximize the system’s performance.
• No Lock-in: Portability frees the business from service providers who could change their terms and conditions.

Cons

• Security: The approach depends on third-party services with unsecured firewall data, which increases security risks.
• Cost:Cloud-agnostic is more expensive compared to the architecture of Cloud-native.

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Introduction

Do you know?

• The value of the global IT outsourcing market hit over $300 billionin 2020.
• Over 89% of the Chief Technical Officersplan to outsource their product development in the future.
• Over 60% of IT companiesstarted outsourcing their product development projects in 2020.

The statistics clearly indicate that most companies are delegating at least some part of their business functions to third-party vendors or outsourcing partners. Along the same lines, outsourcing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) has become a popular business strategy as it helps businesses scale quickly and affordably.

What Is an MVP?

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a product version with only a limited set of features. This version allows businesses to test the functionality of the product and gather customer feedback on the same before launching the fully capable product. The success or failure of MVP can significantly impact business decisions. That’s why it is essential to understand if an outsourced product development partner can add value to MVP development.

In-house vs. Outsourced Product Development

Traditionally, businesses have designed and developed their products in-house. This process includes in-depth market research, conceptual design, prototyping, product engineering, and systems maintenance. Companies hire expert technical staff in each key area to realize success.

However, outsourcing has transformed this scenario. With outsourced product development, businesses can access a pool of talented product developers and designers with the necessary skill set to develop their products. They hire a third party to take care of product development and perform related services pertaining to technology strategy, user experience design, custom software development, and ongoing product iterations.

To that end, here are five ways an outsourced product development partner adds value to MVP development initiatives:

1. Easy Access to In-Depth Knowledge, Experience, And Skills

If you have an amazing product idea but do not have sufficient resources, expertise, and experience to build the product, it is not possible to successfully launch an MVP. The shortage of software developers and high remuneration packages can only add to the woes.

Here, an outsourced product development partner can be an excellent fit. They can provide easy access to all resources and competencies, including consulting, viable MVP development, and custom software development services, in a timely and cost-effective manner. The outsourced development partner can also provide turnkey solutions that suit your project specifications and budget.

Also Read: Why IT hiring is getting difficult? And here’s what you can do about it if you are a startup!

2. Significant Cost Savings

Every business looks to monitor and control its financial resources in every possible manner. Unfavorably, in-house product development can be very costly and might require a lot of time, effort, and dedication.

Contrarily, outsourced product development allows you to gain broad access to the global talent pool and hire IT specialists according to your budget. However, selecting the most cost-efficient partner must not be the only evaluation criteria. It is important to assess the competency of the team that will work on your MVP development:

• Check the company references and existing clients
• Ask for the resume of developers who will work on your project
• Start with the prototype of the project
• Perform a time-and-materials assessment
• Evaluate if the business has streamlined and automated workflows that improve productivity

Learn the key ingredients that make product development successful.

3. Reduced Time to Market

It has been rightly said by Benoit Mandelbrot – “Every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.” This is especially applicable to startup businesses because the more you wait, the more your competitors have the chance to win potential customers. And it also gets difficult for your product to compete in the market and grow business revenues.

An outsourced development partner can help you build, test, launch, and scale the product at a much faster pace. You can focus on growing your business while the third party takes care of testing the MVP. More profoundly, the outsourced partner can help with rigorous testing and validating the product version and assessing whether it:

• Meets the business and technical constraints
• Is easy to use and intuitive
• Runs well in various scenarios, with regards to performance and stability
• Accurately represents the brand and concept
• Is easy to update and maintain

The partner can also drive maintenance, add new features or product lines, and perform the necessary upgrades to improve the quality of the product version under test. When all this happens at a faster pace, you are better positioned to cater to the market quickly and further respond to the fluctuating business landscape and consumer preferences.

4. Better Control and Agile Development

Outsourced MVP development excels at producing swift and flexible solutions. The development partner releases a working version of MVP on a regular basis, with features and additions based on feedback from customers.

The use of development tools, the deployment on a platform like AWS or Azure, the assessment of the day-to-day project progress, and the ability to deploy prototypes or product versions in a shorter time period — all come together to nurture a highly scalable, flexible, and repeatable development environment.

5. Project Management

MVP development necessitates a lot of coordination and synchronization within and between different teams. The product must be designed and developed according to market trends, business requirements, and competitive landscape. Plus, it must factor in the complexity of the application itself and the associated business processes before release.

An outsourced development partner can help deal with project management challenges by:

• Providing project planning and estimation services
• Improving project and resource management
• Integrating various teams, departments, and system components
• Helping with operational risks
• Scheduling work per deadlines
• Engaging in critical incident management and response

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Introduction

Cloud’s viability has grown massively in recent years, with scalability, enterprise
mobility, lower infrastructure costs, and seamless management taking center stage.
While some companies have successfully shifted to the cloud and are reaping the
benefits, others are in the process of performing similar migrations. Considering that
there are various cloud migration strategies to pursue, these businesses must ensure
that they tread the right path to bring about the desired results.
A cloud migration strategy refers to the plan formulated by an organization to move the
resources (applications + data) residing in the existing infrastructure to the cloud.
To help with that, this article outlines the various cloud migration strategies suitable for
organizations of different sizes. But before that, let’s explore the factors that influence
migrations to the cloud in general.

Factors Influencing Cloud Migration

Planning for cloud migration is essential for companies moving their entire system to
the cloud and their existing users who’d want to capitalize on the business benefits it
offers.
To that end, some of the factors that influence the cloud migration strategy adopted by a
company include:

● Staying Updated on the Recent Trends
What seems to be trending today might become obsolete sometime in the future. Old
infrastructure does not customarily integrate well with the latest technologies and
accrues high costs.
However, establishing a cloud environment allows the users to keep upgrading
regularly. With the cloud, companies do not have to invest money at every stage of
their product life cycle, nor do they have to risk the integrity of data or the
performance of their applications when a component is updated.
If the company’s primary aim is to stay updated with the latest tech trends, then it is
always viable to use the refactoring strategy in cloud migration (discussed in detail
later on in this article).

● Keeping Cost Low
Undoubtedly, maintaining an in-house data center and server can be a very costly
and time-consuming endeavor. Contrarily, working in a cloud environment allows
companies to operate on a pay-as-you-go model. Simply put, a cloud server can be
decommissioned at any time, reducing the wastage of resources.
Some of the costs included in cloud migration are – the cost of IaaS services, moving
resources, and the cost of training employees.
Note: If the cost of maintaining the cloud exceeds the costs incurred by the existing
framework, the company must decide on which component to retain, refactor, and
retire.

● Ensuring Better Interoperability
Users invariably want to access applications from various devices like desktops to
smartwatches. To cater to these needs, the company must ensure its business and
technology structure constantly evolves. They can opt for refactoring if they want to
create an agile framework.

● Top-Notch Security and Compliance
Cloud migration results in a few security risks while transferring extensive data.
Organizations must ensure all the client information is stored in a different
framework and all the new access controls are in place.
In the same vein, some companies look for cloud services that allow configuring
server locations, ensuring the server is geographically closer and safe.

● Investment in the Cloud Model
Investing in the cloud is considered an operational expense. However, if a company
sticks to a cloud service provider for a specific period and pays costs upfront, it is a
capital expenditure. Many cloud service providers work based on subscriptions and
provide various discounts.
The mode of payment depends on the financial model chosen by the company. The
decision is made by the tech, business, and finance teams. Depending on the cost, the
company can choose a cloud provider during migration.

Cloud Migration Strategies

Here are some of the best cloud migration strategies to look forward to.

● Rehosting

One of the most commonly used cloud migration strategies is the “classic lift and
shift cloud migration strategy” or “rehosting.”
Rehosting refers to migrating all the applications, data, and operating systems
available in the in-house server to a cloud-based platform.
It is the best for smaller organizations with simple workloads strategizing their
long-term plans regarding services and scalability. Besides, rehosting is for those
tech infrastructures that depend mainly on virtual machines.

Pros
● Since it does not entail making changes to the architecture, Lift and Shift
migration is a simple process.
● It makes planning and budgeting cloud service migration easy.
● Rehosting is faster when compared to other strategies.
● It eliminates the risk of breaking anything by playing with the application’s
code.

Cons
● Sometimes this strategy fails to consider various other benefits of the cloud,
mainly flexibility.
● Although it takes less time, it can become costly in the future.
● There are chances of failure due to complex application dependencies.

● Repurchasing

Some companies might want to change their entire enterprise software solutions to
start afresh with new tools — precisely where Repurchasing comes into play. It
focuses on preserving critical data and moving it to SaaS or PaaS cloud solutions.
Some examples of Repurchasing are transferring from CRM to Salesforce or
transferring a backend code previously hosted on-premises to a private cloud server.

Pros
● Easily scalable, highly flexible, and agile.
● You do not have to spend time and effort configuring the framework.
● It is very budget-friendly when compared to refactoring.

Cons
● The employees and end-users must be trained to work with new and
third-party systems, which require time and resources.
● It requires a high-speed bandwidth connection. Having a poor connection can
result in frequent downtimes.
● Repurchasing is not the right option if one uses a highly specialized
application with unique features.

● Refactoring

Refactoring refers to re-engineering the application to become cloud-native. This
strategy involves modifying the existing software to take advantage of cloud-based
features like flexibility and scalability.
It is a complex process compared to other cloud migration approaches because it
involves making changes in the code. Companies who want to add new functionality
to upscale their businesses and cannot achieve it with the current framework can
opt for refactoring.

Pros
● It is easily scalable and flexible, reducing the ROI.
● Refactoring is highly cost-effective in the long term as it matches the actual
resource requirement.● They are quick, reusable, and offer on-demand provisioning.

Cons
● It has a high initial cost.
● Projects take long to create business value.
● Refactoring is not designed for beginners. It involves a lot of advanced coding,
automation, and DevOps skills.
● This cloud migration strategy requires many changes in the application,
which can result in various code and configuration errors.

● Retiring

Many enterprises find obsolete components that wouldn’t provide benefits after
being moved to the cloud. These modules can increase expenses and can be retired
to reduce costs and bolster security.

Pros
● This approach helps to free up space in the in-house data center or server.
● It reduces the cost of maintenance.
● Also, it reduces the risk of security attacks.

Cons
● If, in the future, the business needs the previously retired component,
building it from scratch can be a time-consuming process. It will also need a
lot of resources.

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Introduction

As digital transformation takes over the energy industry, driving technology innovation across the value chain has become the top priority for CIOs. However, as energy and utility companies embrace emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Data Science and Data Analytics, Digital Twin, Renewable Energy Software, and Cloud Computing, they are faced with an array of challenges.

Managing and maintaining these new systems while staying at the leading edge of new trends, regulatory requirements, and sustainability concerns doesn’t come easy. Moreover, energy and utility companies struggle with a lack of standardization across technologies, operational disruptions, change management, and more — all of these hinder operational efficiency and productivity.

The Need for Digital Transformation in the Energy and Utility Industry

The energy industry is facing several headwinds due to high oil prices and worsening fiscal rules. To keep up with rising customer, regulatory, and sustainability expectations, the digital revolution in the energy industry is picking up an immense pace. As companies rush to accomplish their carbon-neutral goals, investments in modern technology are breaking all records.

With renewable energy forecast to produce 35% of the world’s electricity by 2025, there is a collective race to leverage the latest technology innovations to build smart grids, decentralize power distribution, and address evolving sustainability concerns. However, this sudden and widespread implementation of modern technology is making the IT ecosystem extremely difficult to manage and monitor. Energy companies are struggling to:

• Have visibility into the availability, performance, and security of grids and take corrective action based on critical metrics.
• Get their hands on actionable insights to optimize supply chains and boost operational efficiency.
• Navigate the complex web of existing and evolving regulations and ensure compliance with necessary safety and environmental laws.
• Predict consumption patterns and optimize energy distribution accordingly to minimize wastage.
• Enable real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance to minimize costly downtime.

The Need for Optimizing Efficiency and Productivity

From legacy infrastructure to issues related to data management, there’s a lot to consider as the energy sector modernizes. The sector needs to double down on lowering maintenance costs, amplifying production yields, making the processes more reliable and resilient, and increasing system uptime. This is critical since the energy industry has to deliver sustainable solutions while also keeping up with the rapidly rising consumer and regulatory expectations.

But how can this be achieved? There are two pertinent ways to go about optimizing efficiency and productivity in the industry.

Relying on In-House IT Teams

Energy and utility companies can go the in-house route to manage the complex web of IT systems. This bodes well when we consider that the in-house teams will have a profound understanding of the organization’s objectives and the specific challenges that they have been facing.

However, this approach might have a few drawbacks in terms of not having the most skilled resources to manage the changing technology landscape. Moreover, the dearth of adequate technological infrastructure and the high costs of acquiring competent talent may put some organizations off this strategy.

Going for Managed IT Services  

The energy and utility industry is on the road to transformation. Swelled utilization of renewables, versatility issues, and sustainability concerns are just a few drivers driving this collective change. As new technology innovations lay the foundation of smart grids, organizations must steer all their focus to:

• Respond to shifts in user preferences
• Comply with regulations
• Mitigate the risks of today to stay relevant (and sustainable) tomorrow

But most of their time is spent in the day-to-day management of new IT systems. Limited in-house expertise and a growing list of business priorities put energy and utility companies at extreme risk. If you want to make the most of technology innovations while focusing on your core business objectives, you need to embrace the world of Managed IT Services.

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Introduction

According to a 2022 study done by Tigera, 75% of companies are focusing on developing cloud-native applications. Technology giants like Facebook, Spotify, Uber, Netflix, and more are already leveraging cloud-native applications.

So, it makes sense that startup founders are looking at cloud-native application development as a viable way of creating high-performance, scalable, and flexible products and services.

Indeed, cloud-native applications have been soaring up the popularity charts. However, at the same time, it’s noteworthy that the deployment of the same entails an emphasis on the observability and security capabilities of such applications. Not to forget the protection that they need against the rising cyber threats. That’s precisely where an expert partner can help.

So, in this blog, we’ll be exploring what it means to follow a cloud-native approach to developing applications.

What Is Cloud-Native Application Development?

Cloud-native application development refers to leveraging the unique capabilities of cloud infrastructure to develop and deploy high-quality, scalable, and tolerant applications. The approach focuses on reducing the time to deploy applications, increasing the availability of applications, and reducing the cost of operations.

These applications are described as being distributed, event-driven systems that are developed to scale automatically and provide fault tolerance with improved application performance. As such, a cloud-native approach can significantly improve a business’s ability to respond to changing customer demands, competition, or environmental factors by enabling them to develop new features and functionality.

Microservices, containerization, and automation are some of the approaches integral to cloud-native application development.

Why Is It Applied in the Context of Developing Apps?

Traditional software development processes have their advantages, but there are a host of challenges as well. For example, team members are unable to focus on the software itself because of the need to manage system settings and dependencies.

To that end, the main goal of cloud-native application development is to shift the focus from the infrastructure to the application. For that reason, this development approach is ideal for any kind of project that depends upon third-party services/applications and requires high adaptability and ease of management.

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Introduction

The retail sector has undergone significant transformation over the past decade. The rise of eCommerce has forced traditional players in the segment to re-evaluate their investment priorities and direct a significant portion of their annual budgets to engineer newer digital capabilities for both consumer-facing and internal operations.

Among these digital aspirations, retail analytics is often a top contender for the lion’s share of IT budgets. Today, organizations can achieve a clear advantage over the competition if they are able to implement the right big data analytical solutions following best practices in data engineering, data science, and data visualization. This would enable them to set the foundation for newer disruptive innovations like AI/ML.

In 2022, an analysis found that the global market for retail analytics surpassed $6.59 billion. This figure is expected to rise to a staggering $23.53 billion by 2030.

Whether you are a small, medium, or large organization, if you are in the retail domain, data analytics is today an unavoidable component that should be at the heart of your digital stack. Let us have an in-depth look into retail data analytics solutions and uncover the top business benefits they bring to the table.

Why should retail organisations adopt retail data analytics?

Customer Centricity

The most significant benefit that data analytics solutions bring to the retail industry is the ability of businesses to understand and build a shopping experience that puts customer interests in the driving seat. Every customer touch point leaves a data footprint that can give a lot of clues into what they love, how they shop, and what makes them love or hate a retail touch point. Making sense of this data can help retailers erase the friction that most customers complain about in their shopping journey.

Data analytics solutions can help a retailer predict the exact area of a store to place a particular merchandise so that it grabs maximum eyeballs from store visitors, which can ultimately lead to more sales in the long term. They calculate this based on data like distance walked in the store, proximity to stations like in-store café, distance from the entrance or billing counters, etc.

Eventually, this data can be monetized by the retailer by striking deals with retail brands to place their products in areas that attract more patronage and sure-shot sales. This makes it a win-win for both the customer and the business.

Price Management

Retailers base their strategic discussions mostly on their ability to realize revenue from inventory. A critical component of sales is striking the right balance between profitability and pricing of products that are up for sale across digital or physical outlets.

Data analytics strategy can help retailers arrive at a sustainable pricing model for different goods by analyzing data on past purchases, product shelf-life, logistical efforts, margins, and the ability of the product to initiate future up-sell or cross-sell activities.

For example, an analytics solution can help a retailer fix a lower price on a printer by helping them bundle a periodic subscription for ink refilling along with the initial sale. This ensures that the lower upfront price will help win the sale and assure the retailer of a continuous revenue stream for the refills.

The exact price can be determined by processing data such as the cost of ink, inflation metrics over the subscription period, the potential demand for refills, and much more.

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Introduction

Unstructured data refers to information that lacks a predefined organization or format. As such, it’s challenging to analyze using traditional methods.

Unstructured data is typically diverse, voluminous, and continuously generated. It poses challenges for storage, retrieval, and analysis due to its lack of uniformity, requiring advanced technologies such as natural language processing and machine learning to extract valuable insights.

In this article, we look at how enterprises can go about addressing the concerns with unstructured data and actually use it for good.

Unstructured Data Paves the Way for Numerous Opportunities

Extracting insights and knowledge from unstructured data can prove immensely viable for enterprises to reveal hidden patterns, trends, and correlations. It can help offer a holistic view of the business landscape and advance an enterprise’s understanding of customer preferences and behaviors.

In fact, unstructured data is considered critical to data analytics initiatives for a variety of reasons. For one, businesses can address broad use cases because the data is adaptable. Plus, they can tap into a large pool of competitive insights – all while ensuring that they operate on a pay-as-you-go model (leveraging cloud data lakes, for instance) to lower operational costs.

A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) outlines how unstructured clinical text data can also help with sophisticated prediction model development. So, of course, the opportunities are there for organizations to tap into.

But, There are Challenges in Handling Unstructured Data

The Volume, Variety, and Velocity Issue

Unstructured data is often massive in volume and continuously generated, posing challenges for storage and processing. It comes in diverse formats such as text, images, videos, social media posts, and more, which makes it complex to handle and analyze.

Lack of Standardized Formats and Structure

Unstructured data does not follow predefined formats or structures. So, it’s challenging to organize and categorize it. Besides, it lacks uniformity, which can hinder enterprises from driving consistent analysis.

Difficulties in Data Integration and Data Quality

Integrating unstructured data with structured data can be complex, requiring advanced techniques and technologies. Also, unstructured data may have varying levels of quality. This makes it crucial to bring approaches like data cleansing and normalization to the mix.

Privacy, Security, and Compliance Concerns

Unstructured data may contain sensitive or personally identifiable information. This can raise privacy and security concerns. Besides, complying with data protection regulations becomes challenging when dealing with unstructured data due to its decentralized and fragmented nature.

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