This article is featured on Confluence’s blog.
Whether we are watching Netflix, asking Amazon Alexa for a weather update or checking our email through Office365, cloud computing has changed the way we consume and create information, and how we interact with technology. This reality has been escalated with the “new normal” of working from home and the implementation of business continuity plans due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Massive numbers of people are working outside traditional office spaces, resulting in more interactions with business applications on a daily or even hourly basis. With this ramped up evolution in demand and use, it is vital that these applications be dependable, secure and efficient. As businesses look to maximize these elements in their enterprise applications, understanding the difference between “cloud native” and “cloud wrapped” solutions could not be more important when it comes to managing financial assets.
Given all the benefits (and attention) associated with it, many tech vendors are looking for ways to identify their offering as “cloud-based” even if it was not the original design for the service. And that origin is the critical difference: a non-native solution skips the hard work of design and building to the rigorous specs of the cloud, and instead relies on a newly created web-based front end attached to legacy application architecture. These are considered cloud wrapped solutions. Though they may sound similar, these are vastly different than cloud native solutions.
Cloud wrapped solutions often still have many of the same problems as their legacy progenitors. They are harder to support and maintain. Innovation is limited and higher costs will eventually be passed to you, the client. Cloud native solutions have a totally different upgrade cycle. Instead of large annual releases where parallel versions of software are run as testing takes place, and in-house IT teams and external consultants are called in, upgrades happen invisibly without any overhead being added. They can be done as frequently or infrequently as needed and add no cost to the end user. A true cloud native service will make your life easier, as the software is more efficient and dependable.
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