low code
What is a low-code development platform?
With the rise of digital transformation, embracing a low-code development platform—which anyone can use to rapidly develop new applications—is a major way your company can adapt and prosper.
Why adopt a low-code platform?
As workplaces continue to shift and evolve, more people work from home and use mobile devices. In response, businesses have had to make quick changes to meet their employees’ new needs, including continuing to learn how to better support workers with apps that increase productivity, collaboration, and efficiency.
Low-code development can facilitate your company’s digital transformation. Instead of relying heavily on programming, low-code development platforms—also called low-code application platforms—simplify app development with techniques like drag-and-drop functionality and visual guidance. This means that anyone in your company, regardless of their technical expertise or abilities, can build low-code apps so that the business can offload some tasks from IT.
Unlike professional developers, business users might not know much about hand-coding and typically lack formal training in programming, but they can still build applications using low-code platforms. Because low code simplifies the app-building process, users don’t need to be coding experts to build efficient apps. Empowering business users to create apps also frees up your IT and development resources so they can focus on more complex projects.
Low-code platforms also help your business and developers address the growing need for top-of-the-line internal workflow applications, timesaving automations, better customer experiences, and seamless integrations. It can also help your professional developers build apps faster and avoid writing code line by line.
microsoft dataverse
Data Is Fueling Digital Transformation
Organizations across industries have embraced digital transformation in recent years, leveraging technology to improve processes and systems, reduce costs, develop new products, drive growth, improve the customer experience, and ultimately gain an edge on their competitors.
In a way, data is both the cause and the effect of digital transformation. Any effective digital transformation effort will rely on internal data to help business stakeholders achieve new insights. In fact, this is the “transformation” part of digital transformation — a term that should be reserved for technology use cases that fundamentally change how an organization operates and delivers value to its customers. At the same time, new digital workflows inevitably produce additional data, creating even more opportunities for organizations to optimize their operations.
These opportunities come with pressure for organizations to keep pace with industry competitors by continuously using data in new and creative ways that lead to tangible improvements. According to a 2022 report from Gartner, business leaders believe future decisions will become more and more complex, increasing the demand for data and analytics. “Connections between diverse and distributed data and people create truly impactful insight and innovation,” the report notes. “These connections are critical to assisting humans and machines in making quicker, more accurate, trustworthy and contextualized decisions while taking an increasing number of factors, stakeholders and data sources into account.”
According to a McKinsey report, only 8 percent of organizations truly “break away from the pack” when it comes to analytics, while the rest struggle to capture real value from their efforts. The problem is that most companies are content to eke out small gains from a few limited use cases rather than adopting analytics across the organization. By contrast, breakaway performers align their analytics efforts to strategy; embed analytics into processes and decision-making; and build a solid foundation of data, technologies and people to help them achieve their goals.
Meet the Modern Data Platform
Data-driven decisions require the ability to analyze data quickly and reliably. Organizations need data platforms that don’t slow them down. Many business and IT leaders have found that traditional data systems are rigid, costly, complex and ineffective, with disparate technologies stitched together in a way that creates multiple potential points of failure. By contrast, a modern data platform enables organizations to handle the volume, velocity and variety of data necessary for organizations to get ahead of their competitors.
A modern data platform should have several essential characteristics.
NEARLY UNLIMITED FLEXIBILITY
Elasticity, scalability and modularity are core features of modern data platforms. These solutions can not only leverage major public cloud hyperscalers but will also likely utilize Software as a Service platforms. Unlike traditional platforms built with scarce and costly hardware resources, cloud data solutions offer virtually unlimited capacity for organizations to store and process their data. This, in turn, provides the ability to run numerous workloads and analytics queries in a central platform without the need to purchase additional physical hardware to accommodate periods of peak demand. As organizations scale out their data environments in the cloud, technology teams must simultaneously assess the technology they have in-house, address any outstanding technical debt and evaluate the skill sets of IT staffers. Many organizations require external consultants and technical experts in order to have these conversations effectively.
SECURE AND GOVERNED DATA ACCESS
If a solution doesn’t feature data governance, then it isn’t a modern data platform. Governance is a cornerstone of the modern data platform, and part of what sets it apart from traditional data architectures. In legacy data systems, governance, security, data duplication and silo issues are common. Ultimately, these legacy systems sometimes require IT leaders to spend more time managing their infrastructure than actually working with data to achieve transformational insights. By contrast, the modern data platform simplifies and unifies data environments, leading to more streamlined governance and security. With a modern data platform, custom access controls can be set with the flip of a switch. Improved governance and security practices not only help organizations to comply with data safety and privacy regulations and protect their environments from compromise, they also increase trust in data among users, making them more likely to leverage internal data in their own work.
DATA FOR EVERYONE
This is sometimes called “democratization” of data. Less important than the specific term, though, is the concept: Organizations must make data available for analysis across various lines of business in ways that allow users to take action. Too often, business leaders think of innovation as something that is limited to product development or operations teams. But when they’re given the right data — and a modern data platform that allows them to access, trust and analyze information — users across an organization are empowered to innovate. Within organizations that promote a culture of data for everyone, stakeholders in areas such as legal, human resources and accounts payable may uncover insights that unlock new efficiencies or lead to new revenue streams. A modern data platform delivers the foundation for capabilities such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to everyone who needs them, helping to fuel transformation.
cloud transforMATION
What Is Cloud Transformation and Why Is It Important?
Companies of all sizes are undergoing cloud transformation to keep up with the speed of modern business. Cloud services make it easier to efficiently deliver services, engage with customers, and manage other business operations, so it makes sense that cloud migration is a top priority for most companies around the world.
In this post, we’re going to look at the benefits of cloud transformation, as well as some of the challenges associated with it. That way, you can come up with a transformation strategy that helps your company reach its strategic goals while also preparing you for the challenges ahead.
What You Need to Know About Cloud Transformation
So, wat is cloud transformation anyway?
Simply put, cloud transformation is the process of migrating your business from local servers to the cloud. This can be a lengthy process, as cloud transformation doesn’t mean simply switching to a cloud-based solution. Cloud transformation involves…
- Migrating apps and software programs
- Moving company data to the cloud
- Transforming your IT infrastructure
The amount of time it takes to see your cloud transformation goals turn into reality depends on the complexity of your operation. If you’ve already adopted some cloud technology, it could only take a few months to migrate most you
Why Your Organization Needs Cloud Transformation
Cloud transformation isn’t anything new. In 2012, Forrester found that 52% of enterprise decision-makers believed developing a cloud strategy was a “high or critical priority.”
According to Gartner, cloud services are expected to grow 18.4% in 2021. While cloud transformation has been an essential strategy for businesses of all sizes, making the jump to the cloud is now more important than ever. The COVID-19 pandemic showed us that companies in all sectors must accelerate their cloud transformation in order to keep up with an ever-changing business landscape.
How cloud transformation benefits your organization
First and foremost, cloud transformation keeps your organization from becoming obsolete. Technology is constantly changing the way companies do business, and the only way your organization will remain competitive is to adapt to those changes.
But cloud transformation doesn’t just protect your organization against market threats. It also provides several benefits that will help your long-term business strategy and improve your day-to-day operations. Some of those benefits include:
IMPROVED SCALABILITY
Scale up and down when needed, respond to demand immediately, and start new projects without needing to spend time upgrading IT infrastructure.
COST-EFFECTIVENESS
According to a study by IDG Research Services, cloud transformation can reduce IT costs by 25%, as costs are aligned to usage, are more resilient, and are reduced by fewer staffing requirements. And for many organizations, the ROI is 111% with a payback period of just over a year.
INCREASED EFFICIENCY
Companies that adopted cloud platforms are shown to release new capabilities 20-40% faster than those that still use on-premises technology.
modern applications
The time is right for modern application development.
Digital transformation has dramatically impacted the way companies deliver value and the rate at which they make changes to their products and services. Companies are increasingly building
products that are the technology itself or heavily influenced by technology—every company is
becoming a technology company. In order to compete in this new world, businesses must create better digital products, and they must do it at an increasingly rapid pace.
Many companies are innovating faster by changing the way they design, build and manage applications through what we call modern application development. Modern application development increases the agility of your teams and the reliability, security and scalability of your applications. It automates or abstracts away operational overhead to enable teams to
spend more time building business logic. It facilitates an environment in which experimentation thrives because small failures don’t lead to system outages. And it also requires a fundamental shift in the way you approach the creation of value.
Reconsider your application’s architectural
patterns, operational model and software delivery process.
While these shifts are dramatic at an organizational level, the process doesn’t need to be brutal: Many organizations take an inspired leap to build new modern apps in the cloud, but plenty of others take a stepwise approach, one app at a time. However, you approach it, you’ll want to consider the best practices that we have observed our customers take as they build modern apps. While you can approach these practices from any starting point and in any order, the outcome is the same: applications that are more secure, reliable, scalable and quickly available for your customers and partners.