The development of cloud native technologies, architectures, and frameworks in conjunction with the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) continues unabated. Not only is cloud native—in all its forms, past, present, and future—a critical element of the 4IR, but it is also a significant enabler—and accelerator—of the revolution, fusing technologies heavily influenced by advancements in areas like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and robotics.

However, these new technologies do not entirely supersede earlier iterations, nor do they render them obsolete. Instead, there is often—and must often be—a complementary relationship between the new and old. Mainframe servers are a prime example of this phenomenon in that they are still in use, albeit more powerful than ever.

This example—that of mainframe servers—elucidates the critical trend in the current (and future) technological landscape: the coexistence and mutual evolution of old and new technology. Rather than replacing the old, different technologies are adapted and integrated to create efficient, secure, and robust applications.

The Challenges facing Modern Enterprise Organizations

Thus, the challenge facing modern organizations, specifically multi-national enterprise organizations, is leveraging old and new technologies to drive sustainable business success over time in challenging global conditions. Before we consider the solution, let’s look at several of these challenges:

• The ability to scale applications and infrastructure massively to cope with ever-increasing user numbers—across all time zones—together with exponentially growing data and AI-based innovation;
• The need for Agile development practices to ensure that applications are dynamic enough to meet ever-increasing and ever-evolving customer requirements and employee capabilities;
• The ability to meet globalism and multi-nationalism—or the ability for organizations to not only service customers across the globe but also to comply with regional regulatory and security requirements such as the European Union’s GDPR;
• The requirement to run on a mix of on-premises infrastructure and multiple cloud environments across different geographic locations; and
• The ability to supply real-time—or near real-time—data analytics and information for data-driven decision-making activities.

While solving these challenges might seem daunting, they are opportunities for innovation and differentiation, establishing robust applications and future-proofing business models. Therefore, leveraging the right mix of technologies and strategies is crucial to thriving in this complex and dynamic global environment.

The Solution: Adopting Advanced Cloud Architectures

As this subheading indicates, the solution to addressing the multifaceted challenges faced by global organizations is to adopt advanced cloud architectures like hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud, and Supercloud architectures.

Let’s expand on this statement by defining these cloud paradigms and elucidating why they provide unique benefits as an integral part of an overarching solution:

The Hybrid-Cloud

The authors of the research paper titled “A Hybrid Cloud for Effective Retrieval from Public Cloud Services” describe the hybrid cloud as a combination of multiple on-premises servers, public cloud servers, and private cloud servers, allowing organizations to utilize legacy infrastructure as well as modern cloud-based stacks.

The outcomes and benefits of adopting a hybrid cloud are that enterprises can strategically leverage different application deployment models within an overarching application architecture, such as a supply chain and logistics company deploying logistics software on-premises at its warehouses and in public clouds across different geographic locations to comply with regional data privacy and security regulatory requirements.

It also speaks to the requirement for agility and flexibility: the agility needed for rapid application development and deployment, as well as the ability to combine legacy applications with dynamic, scalable applications.

The Multi-Cloud

The research paper “An Overview of Multi-Cloud Computing” describes multi-cloud as combining cloud services from multiple cloud providers. This approach combines different cloud environments, including public, private, and hybrid clouds from various cloud-based service providers.

Some of its benefits include improving risk management, avoiding vendor lock-in, and leveraging the best services from each vendor. This strategy allows organizations to tailor their cloud infrastructure to specific preferences and requirements, optimizing performance, scalability, and cost.

The Supercloud

Bernard Marr, in his article titled “The Future of Computing: Supercloud and Sky Computing,” defines the Supercloud as a concept that extends beyond the hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud paradigms, referring to an overarching cloud architecture that seamlessly integrates services from multiple cloud providers, and providing a unified environment.

At this juncture, it is reasonable to assume that the question that begs is what the difference is between the multi-cloud and the Supercloud?

As noted by Bernard Mars: “Technological progress never stands still, and more recently, new terms, including Supercloud… have emerged to describe what the next stage in the evolution of what Infrastructure-as-a-Service might look like.”

Therefore, in summary, the Supercloud concept—and paradigm—is just the next technological advancement in cloud computing. Moreover, this framework aims to provide enhanced interoperability, flexibility, and scalability across multiple cloud platforms as well as allow users to leverage the best features of various cloud ecosystems without being restricted to a single cloud environment.

The Benefits of Adopting Advanced Cloud Architectures

Now that we have defined each of these cloud-based architectures, let’s look at how they solve the challenges outlined above:

Globalism and Compliance

As highlighted above, each of these advanced cloud architectures combines on-premises servers as well as public and private cloud environments, simplifying—and solving—the data security and privacy regulatory requirements described in regional laws like the EU’s GDPR.

For instance, imagine you have a multinational logistics and supply chain enterprise that ships goods worldwide. One of your routes is a sea route between the Port of New York, USA, and the Port of Rotterdam, Netherlands. This precludes the fact that your customers are both in the USA and the European Union; you must comply with the GDPR. The simplest—and most effective—way to achieve this is to host customer data from your Dutch customers in the European Union even though your company’s headquarters are in the USA—thereby complying with the GDPR.

Scalability

These advanced cloud architectures are designed to simplify the automated scaling of cloud native applications across multiple geographical regions. In other words, using a containerized microservices-based application architecture, with Kubernetes as a container orchestration platform as well as a cloud native integration platform across the globally distributed network, provides the functionality to scale resources up and down—or in and out—based on user requirements.

For example, let’s return to the logistics application described above. Let’s assume your USA and Netherlands customers are increasing their stock for the annual festive season over December each year. Therefore, your shipping requests will increase.

It is also important to note that your software includes an online shipment booking module. Therefore, as the number of users that try to access this module increases, Kubernetes will scale up the application by spinning up containers containing this module to meet the increase in demand. And when the busy period is over, Kubernetes will spin down the extra containers.

Cutting-Edge Real-Time Data Analytics

These advanced cloud architectures enable real-time—or near real-time—data analytics. This is a critical component for businesses, allowing management to make informed decisions quickly, especially in today’s fast-paced environment. These architectures include the requisite infrastructure and tools to process and analyze extensive volumes with minimal latency.

For instance, the hybrid-cloud architecture offers data processing at source. In other words, in this setup, data can be processed closer to its source, significantly reducing latency. Secondly, hybrid clouds allow organizations to use scalable analytics tools located in public clouds while keeping sensitive data on-premises.

Multi-cloud environments enable organizations to choose a particular data analytics tool from a specific cloud and a second app from another. Not only can organizations select the best tools possible for specific analytics requirements, enhancing the quality and speed of insights, but this principle also reduces redundancy and increases reliability.

Lastly, the Supercloud architecture includes a unified analytics platform, allowing organizations to manage and analyze data across different cloud environments. An added benefit of Superclouds is they often have advanced AI and machine learning capabilities, essential for modern predictive analytics and real-time decision-making.

In Conclusion

Finally, the persistent development of these advanced cloud-based architectures and frameworks, together with the 4IR, is a testament to the dynamic nature of progress. In their evolving forms, cloud native solutions are not just a critical aspect of 4IR but also serve as significant catalysts for change, accelerating the 4IR.

These cloud-based paradigms provide the foundation—and impetus—for a highly scalable, agile, dynamic, and global organization that prizes the extent to which it can meet—and exceed—customer requirements, driving sustainable growth over time.