Balancing cloud innovation and business continuity

The challenges of managing the cloud journey for your business are undoubtedly real, from broken-up application integration to disrupted innovation cycles, but there are some steps you can take to ensure both your innovation and legacy technologies work together in harmony on the way.

Is it easy creating room for cloud innovation while keeping your core business systems secure? Not really. It’s a balancing act that can leave your company rather disjointed, disorganized, and worst of all – open to operational inefficiency and slowing innovation.

Think about it:

• What happens when your testing and experimentation of new technologies and processes impacts your core production systems?
• What will you do if it causes unexpected downtime, forcing you to lose revenue and profits while getting those production systems back up again?
• Will you be able to reassess and reinstate the innovation testing and experimenting?

It’s not easy adopting new technologies on top of mission-critical systems for good reason. The type of integration that is needed must be able to address a plethora of use cases and deployment alternatives. The business doesn’t care about where apps are hosted, neither is it interested in vendor-specific boundaries and compatibility issues.

So, what do you do?

#1: Cater for varying speeds of innovation

Businesses often mistake “innovation” for “speed.” You can understand why, in this competitive marketplace, you sometimes need to be the first out of the gate with new enterprising technology or process that can revamp or reinvent an entire vertical or industry.

At other times, the business is well served with incremental improvements. Make sure you manage concurrent testing operations that vary in speed. This will help to eliminate any downtime if experimentation fails and causes systems to briefly shut down.

In the end, when you’re more consistent in your approach than your competitors – who are constantly working through trial and error and having to deal with downtime – chances are good you’ll be first to the finish line.

#2: Speaking of failure…. embrace it

It’s okay to fail when you are exploring innovations that are still not ripe for implementation and integration – that’s par for the course. Expect those test runs to fail. Allow for it.

But here’s the trick: Allow for it while making sure not to impact your core production systems. How?

That leads us to:

#3: Partition off innovation endeavors from core systems

The last, final word to achieving ongoing innovations in your industry without causing problems to your core systems: APIs. Think of an API as a “surge protector,” bridging a connection safely while maintaining autonomy between both “platforms” or “systems.”

In doing so, you allow for innovation to run literally on top of your core systems with minimal to no impact, running completely independent of each other, and self-manageable. The interconnectivity allows for sharing of resources but without the dependency that is so apparent and difficult to deal with.

In other words, instead of just keeping the house of cards from toppling, you are strengthening it. Sure, that’s easier said than done, but thankfully Software AG has the tools you’ll need.

Rigorous API management, intuitively managing operations throughout without missing a beat, makes for a great solution that will make cloud integration a cinch – while achieving new innovations as they crop up in the technology circle.

All it takes is the will to move forward. Stay relevant. Be a trendsetter. And let APIs and robust integration tools propel you into the next future.

For more answers on how Software AG can do that, just click here!