Cloud native, Why not ? Every one is doing it....

Every CIO in the industry might get tired of hearing the word "Cloud" again and again, Let us discuss some of the use cases for the "Cloud" for most of the organizations and who can be most benificial and not so much for some.

Below are the items that influence your strategy for the cloud integrations.

Technology stack: I have seen companies grow organically and so their custom softwares too, Lot of companies might be using VB, .Net 2.0, Java 1.X in their applications which may be relying 20 years ols technologies or poorly written and designed SQL queries. Few questions you would have to get answers from the business is

Is business happy with the current performance and feature set of the application?

Do they get good results from thier data out of custom tool? You know like dash boards, forecastting models...etc

Does the application work with any 3rd party applications seamlessly?

Can it scale and performs to the future needs of the Org?

If you answered YES to every question above you might not need to think about going native to the cloud.

Budget/Funds: On avergae IT department get to spend 4% of their revenues as per Gartner statistics, it can go up to 15% if there is business approved IT initiatives(like ERP,Ecom..etc). Can you deploy data warehouse or Big data platform to analyze TBs of data you accumulated over years to get all good stuff like customer profiles, top sold products, price range most in need..etc without braking bank. With cloud you can but on premise , not so much.

Migrating to cloud and cloud first solution development gives you more powerful tool stack(elastic search,Auto scaling,EMR..etc) to modernize,optimize your current applications.You will have to design them to be portable and should be able to host it on own private cloud as public cloud can cost you more money in the long run.

Roadmap and Vision: Running business getting more complex and competitive than ever and IT plays bigger role to keep you in the game, look at amazon and walmart to learn how IT helps. Your business startegy should have IT in line with you business goals and milestone you setout to achieve.Buid your team of Business and IT to be colloborative and agile.

Some scenarios where business can not move aheadnwith out right technologies on their side:

If you are a Bank and want your customers to stay home and use all of your services yet, You need well thought out mobile platform to deposit checques, to transfer,to invest..etc

If you are in to E commerce and want to cut down mediocre sellers and weed out mismatched product listings, You need great AI and ML systems to quality check every listing and compare them with products in the market.

You are in to health care and you like to helpyour customers not to get sick, have healthier life style. You would need to design data pipeline which can analyze their food habbits, life style,past doctor visits, existing symptoms and comeup with statistically possible helping advises and services to the customers.