Composable applications without cloud lock-in
Amid a rapid pace of change, periods of significant disruption, and evolving customer expectations, being able to quickly and seamlessly adapt, respond, and deliver innovation is becoming a critical capability for businesses. For increasing numbers of organisations, composability is the key to achieving the required resilience and agility as it enables them to quickly and easily assemble, reassemble, and adapt applications to changing business needs.
Within many enterprises, developers are at the heart of this drive for composability, with these individuals wanting to move technology up the stack and use less code for faster and more effective delivery of services such as business intelligence or analytics. It is also becoming an increasing priority across sectors, ranging from healthcare to supply chain organisations, both of which are among those particularly suited to composability, given the integrated and interoperable nature of such businesses and their partners. For these organisations, successfully implementing composability would empower them to extend interoperability along their ecosystem of applications and increase agility.
Yet although the major public cloud vendors provide the building blocks and components for composable applications, companies fear vendor lock-in. As such, while businesses value the elasticity of cloud resources, the majority do not want to be restricted by cloud-specific capabilities and instead seek independence and portability.
However, finding a way round this can open up a can of worms. For instance, using separate systems outside the cloud to provide analytical capabilities means businesses are likely to run into the problem of creating additional data silos and data in different formats. This ultimately hinders interoperability and creates friction that undermines performance.
Consequently, businesses need to find an approach that balances all of these considerations, allowing them to lay the foundations for composable applications but without introducing other challenges, whether that be vendor lock-in or data silos.
Smart data fabric-enabled composability
As organisations look to develop composable applications without compromising other aspects, smart data fabrics, a new architectural approach that speeds and simplifies access to data assets across the entire business, are poised to help bring organisations’ services and applications together. This is because a smart data fabric accesses, transforms, and harmonises data from multiple sources, on demand, to make it usable and actionable for a wide variety of business applications. It is thereby easier, faster, and simpler for organisations to develop composable applications in the cloud.
By deploying a unified data platform at the core of the smart data fabric, organisations also gain increased real-time visibility and accessibility across the whole technology stack. Given that if an organisation does not have a real-time, consistent data layer to deliver the right information at the right time, its composable applications will be far less effective, this is a major step forward.
A single viable solution
Furthermore, composable applications using artificial intelligence or machine learning demand high volumes of clean data from many sources, both within and outside of an organisation - a requirement that only a unified data platform can fulfil. This is owing not only to the fact a smart data fabric integrates data from a wide range of sources, but also because a wide range of analytics capabilities are embedded directly within the fabric, including data exploration, business intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning.
Together, these capabilities make it faster and easier for organisations to gain new insights and power intelligent predictive and prescriptive services and composable applications.
Composable applications without compromise
By adopting a smart data fabric approach to composability, businesses can lay the solid foundations they require to construct and deploy applications easier, faster, and simpler while retaining the independence and portability they desire. It will allow organisations to meet myriad goals, whether that’s moving technology up the stack, speeding time to value, or gaining advanced insights, without compromise – preventing cloud vendor lock-in and the creation of additional data silos. In such a fast-moving landscape, this approach will ensure that reinventing the wheel every time they need to build a new application becomes a thing of the past and instead arm businesses with the agility, resilience, and innovation they need to respond to changing requirements.
You can find out more about InterSystems on their website.
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