How SaaS advantages from cloud-native development

Many corporations use software-as-a-service (SaaS) or industrial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications to modernize their business functions and replace legacy core applications and systems of record. While these solutions offer advantages equivalent to lower cost and complexity in comparison with custom development, their customization potential is restricted, which might undermine any built-in advantages as you progress further away from the industrial product’s supported core use cases. Additionally, integrations with existing systems and databases are sometimes mandatory but often cumbersome and should require specialized skills and familiarity with first-party patterns and tools from the SaaS provider.

For many corporations, these additional complexities should not an option. SaaS and COTS are sometimes at best an 80 percent solution to the business needs, and bridging the gap requires costly and complicated customization. Scalability can be a difficulty, as customizations or use cases that fall outside the conventional usage patterns of the product introduce additional variables which can be difficult to mitigate.

Adapting industrial apps is dear, limited and complicated

In addition to the “80 percent solution” problem, it is not uncommon for a company to want to adapt key business or customer-facing workflows to accommodate the restrictions of a industrial platform. A recent example of this problem is the U.S. Department of Defense’s Healthcare Modernization Program. When the Department of Defense chosen Cerner to switch its homegrown electronic health record software, patient providers needed to adapt their workflows to those of the Cerner system. Before the Department of Defense and its vendors may gain advantage from the modernization it had purchased, that they had to grapple with right-sizing, customization, adjusting business practices, maintaining critical interfaces, and migrating patient data. This added as much as a multi-billion-dollar, multi-year development and product management effort. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which took an identical approach, encountered major challengesin addition to.

Cloud-native patterns improve extensibility

Systems and business processes are far too complex in today’s dynamic business environments for the “make or buy” approach to be practical. Today, “customize or build” is a greater framework, and this approach to managing business technologies is greatly enhanced by investing in organizational maturity in cloud-native development. Cloud-native patterns and technologies should not just reserved for custom development or bespoke internal applications. In fact, the advantages of those software development approaches extend beyond the cloud, allowing organizations and their development teams to concentrate on providing support for customizable, feature-rich use cases while ensuring scalability and resilience.

Cloud-native practices, patterns and technologies enhance the advantages of SaaS and COTS while reducing the associated disadvantages by:

• Providing an extensible framework for adding latest functionality to industrial applications without having to customize the core product.
• Leverage API and event-driven architecture to eliminate the necessity for custom data integrations.
• The complexity of most infrastructure and security concerns continues to be outsourced to a vendor, while gaining additional flexibility in implementing scaling and resiliency.
• Enables the innovation of core business systems using latest technologies equivalent to generative AI.

Companies that depend on SaaS or COTS still need the flexibleness to satisfy their ever-evolving business needs. As we saw last yr with advances in AI, change and opportunities can come quickly and all of sudden. Chances are, your organization is already on the trail to cloud-native maturity. Take advantage of this evolution by implementing technologies and patterns, equivalent to using event-driven architectures and serverless functions, to increase your industrial applications relatively than adapting or replacing them.

This article was written by Principal Analyst Devin Dickerson and originally appeared Here.