According to Avanade research, those are the results that business and technology leaders worldwide expect to see from modernizing their IT. Most companies today are moving some or all of their applications to the cloud, which is a central part of IT modernization. But doing cloud right means much more than a migration. Knowing what it means for your company could mean the difference between achieving and not achieving those bottom line benefits.

There are several approaches to get to the cloud, among them lift-and-shift, refactoring and rearchitecting. This can generally be thought of as a progression and each has different benefits in terms of cost, speed, complexity and value delivered. However, for the apps that are most important to your business, the apps that differentiate you in your market, consider going native: cloud native. Cloud native applications are built from the ground up in the cloud to take maximum advantage of the cloud. It’s typically the best way to optimize your ROI and accelerate the business and technology success of your digital transformation.

The cloud native approach can deliver the next level of velocity, agility and innovation that you can harness for competitive advantage. With increased velocity, you can go to market faster with more innovative and differentiated solutions. When your IT is more agile, you can respond to business needs faster. You can partner with other businesses more effectively. You can enter new markets and be a disruptive force in mature ones.

You can do so more easily and effectively, too, by leveraging ever-advancing services of the public cloud platforms, such as Microsoft Azure, that go well beyond the benefits of a lift-and-shift to IaaS. Those services can include cognitive services, predictive analytics, and IoT—and they can add strategic business value to your applications that very few companies could afford to build and maintain. By going cloud native, you can stand on the shoulders of giants to quickly and easily bring capability to your solutions for a negligible share of their true cost.

If you do adopt a cloud-native approach, you won’t be alone. In a January 2018 a Gartner report titled “Why you must begin delivering cloud native offerings today, not tomorrow” Gartner estimates that by 2020, most traditional applications migrated from private data centers to the public cloud will use cloud-native architectural precepts—up from fewer than 10% last year.

There’s a lot to keep in mind as you prepare to go cloud-native. Here are four ways your business may need to change:

• Your architecture. Cloud native apps must be architected for the cloud environment in which they will run. That means you’ll need to adopt or expand your use of new architectural styles and processes, including a microservices architecture to take advantage of PaaS, and API integration into the broader ecosystem.
• Your governance and operating model. All the policies and procedures around provisioning and deprovisioning resources and allocating consumption costs need to be reconsidered, if not modified, in the context of the cloud, as do security practices and implementation of data residency requirements.
• Your culture. DevOps needs to become a major part of your culture if it’s not already. The heavy use of automation and repeatable processes throughout the cycle of design, development, deployment, maintenance and decommissioning is crucial to maximizing the cost-saving benefits of native cloud apps.
• Your mindset. Agile is often conflated with DevOps but, while the latter focuses on how you build and maintain software, Agile is a mindset that guides you in when and what to build with continuous improvement being a key principle. Effectively adopting an Agile mindset means moving from a project mentality to a product mentality—that is, being laser-focused on the products and services you provide to your consumers and organizing your team, processes and investments with this in mind.

Want to know more about how to prepare your enterprise to optimize the benefits it gets from going cloud native? Visit our cloud and application services page.