In today’s ever-evolving digital realm, enterprises find themselves navigating a dynamic landscape where constant innovation and adaptation are imperative for success. From the rapid advancements in technology to the changing expectations of customers and employees, the digital ecosystem is witnessing a plethora of transformative trends that demand attention and strategic action. In this blog post, we delve into the most recent and relevant topics impacting the digital landscape for enterprise companies, including insights from our leaders on how they reflect on our services and our customers.
Cloud Computing: self-service on-demand pipelines, agnostic infrastructure, and hybrid monitoring
Behind the pay-as-you-go pricing model, the public cloud is teeming with the latest and greatest development, DevOps, and AI tools for building even better and more scalable applications. According to InfoWorld, there are at least 16 real innovations in the cloud that can provide immediate benefits and solve long-standing problems with on-premises computing. Today, we’ll cover the top 3 hot topics.
Self-service on- demand pipelines: instruments for speed of innovation while ensuring compliance
One of the challenges in accelerating the speed of innovation is developers having to wait for operations to provision and assign dedicated infrastructure, increasing risks from many users provisioning infrastructure and manual processes, and increasing costs from over-provisioning and unused infrastructure. Self-service pipelines provide a library of versioned and validated infrastructure templates to be consumed for on-demand provisioning.
The innovative solution increases development agility by allowing developers to provision their own infrastructure without an operator bottleneck, which also increases the operators’ productivity, spending time on more strategic requests. It also reduces risks with a single workflow to secure, govern and audit the infrastructure regardless of who provisions it.
Cloud Agnostic Architecture: run applications in any cloud platform
A cloud-agnostic architecture strategy focuses on designing applications that can seamlessly run in any cloud environment, regardless of the specific tools and capabilities offered by a particular cloud platform. This approach allows for greater flexibility and avoids vendor lock-in by integrating a mix of vendors and open-source tools. Developers working with a cloud-agnostic architecture have the freedom to leverage evolving open-source tools and libraries to meet their specific needs. However, this approach may require more effort and expertise as developers need to create and integrate functionalities themselves.
On the other hand, a cloud-native strategy allows for faster time-to-market for application builds and takes advantage of features exclusive to specific providers. While cloud-native architecture offers convenience and efficiency, it may limit flexibility and scalability as applications are tied to a specific platform.
The two approaches, cloud-agnostic and cloud-native, are not mutually exclusive, and businesses can adopt a hybrid strategy based on their unique needs. For critical core business apps and services, a cloud-agnostic strategy can ensure continuity and reduce dependency on a single cloud provider. Ancillary apps and services can be deployed using cloud-native architecture for speed and cost efficiency. Ultimately, a cloud-agnostic strategy requires an automated-first approach, with infrastructure provisioning, testing, and integration managed through CI pipelines to streamline operations and support the increased workload on DevOps teams.
If you’re not sure how to apply those concepts within your organization, we strongly encourage you to contact us.
“Hence at e-Core, we bring a holistic approach to cloud adoption, starting
from defining the goals, developing a roadmap according to them, and creating an outcome-based execution plan. With our 20+ years of experience in enabling large enterprise clients in their cloud adoption and portfolio modernization journey, plus our relationship with Cloud Service Providers, we help help customer define, execute, and operate their cloud journey.”
Hybrid Cloud Monitoring
Common monitoring and operational platforms are essential for managing and optimizing hybrid cloud deployments. They offer a unified view of the hybrid infrastructure and business services, enabling both IT and businesses to monitor and optimize performance across on-premises and cloud environments. These platforms simplify the integration and management of applications and workloads, ensuring consistency and reducing complexity for IT teams. This enables proactive issue detection, resource allocation optimization, and seamless integration of on-premises and cloud resources. Ultimately, these platforms streamline operations and empower businesses to maximize the benefits of their hybrid cloud deployments.
Although you must design and tailor your architecture to meet these constraints and requirements, you can rely on some common patterns, which can fall into two categories, according to Google Cloud:
- In a single pane of glass, all monitoring and logging is centralized, with the aim of providing a platform for both IT and Business Group to collaborate around reactive and proactive service availability.
- In a separate application and operations architecture, sensitive application data is segregated from less sensitive operations data, with the aim of meeting compliance requirements for sensitive data.
“In the Google Cloud stack, you can use different tools for hybrid cloud monitoring, such as BlueMedora, BindPlane, Prometheus, Fluentd, Fluent Bit, and Grafana. Amid so many options and approaches, we help customers find the optimal strategy according to their business needs.”
Data & Analytics: machine learning
With all the buzz around OpenAI in 2023, at this point, you are already aware that machine learning will be heavily and broadly adopted by enterprise companies in the near future.
Companies like Netflix, Uber, Google, and Spotify have leveraged machine learning operations and data engineering to enhance their services. Netflix provides personalized recommendations, Uber optimizes dynamic pricing, Google improves search results, Spotify offers tailored music recommendations, and Airbnb adjusts pricing dynamically. These examples demonstrate the impact of these solutions on user experiences, operational efficiency, and revenue generation.
However, before collecting impactful results from machine learning, companies need to consider the data engineering structure where a huge amount of data will be processed.
It is critical to understand how it impacts data sharing and collaboration inside and outside your organization to enable secure and controlled data sharing and leveraging external data sources, using Data Lakes, Lake Houses, Data Meshes, and so on. An innovative solution to data sharing in the current landscape is the Practical Data Fabric.
“The practical data fabric concept revolves around creating a unified and scalable architecture for managing and integrating diverse data sources. It involves building data fabric layers that enable efficient data access, integration, and interoperability across the organization. It changes the game for enterprises by mitigating AI risks and promoting sustainability in data initiatives.”
If you’re interested in leveraging practical data fabric benefits to your digital acceleration path, lean on our expertise.
“e-Core helps companies innovate with machine learning operations and data engineering through expertise and consulting, solution development, and platform support. We assist in optimizing data architecture, streamlining data engineering, implementing machine learning models, enhancing model monitoring and management, ensuring data quality optimizing resource allocation.”
Digital Operations: AI assistants for DevOps seamless integration and modern Threat Detection
Innovation in the technology landscape will always impact digital operations across your company and how teams collaborate to foster digital capabilities and accelerate business results. When it comes to integrating DevOps to keep up with the fast-paced innovation scenario, Atlassian has recently launched two new cutting-edge solutions to boost collaboration.
Atlassian AI Assistant for DevOps: stop searching, start asking.
As you may know, AI assistants leverage artificial intelligence to provide smart and interactive support to users, including virtual assistants, chatbots, and voice-based AI interfaces that can assist with tasks, answer questions, provide recommendations, and automate routine processes. In this context, Atlassian launched its AI solution that deeply understands how your teams collaborate to accelerate work, understanding questions you would ask a teammate and answering them instantly.
Whether it is summarizing a meeting in minutes in Confluence, defining new work in Jira Software, or helping you craft that perfect response in Jira Service Management, Atlassian Intelligence does the heavy lifting for you. In addition, Atlassian Intelligence helps operations and support teams get up to speed faster by:
- Surfacing previously resolved or related issues to empower faster incident resolution;
- Recommending relevant knowledge base articles and related pages to resolve requests and incidents faster.
“As Open AI offers the value of AI for individuals, Atlassian Intelligence delivers the power of AI in every team member’s hands within your company, and according to your business-specific context, which elevates collaboration and competitive standards to a next-gen level.”
Atlassian Intelligence is available in early access. Contact e-Core and join the waitlist for Atlassian Intelligence and get ahead of your competition to future-proof your enterprise.
Beacon: intelligent threat detection, built for Atlassian cloud products
As you may know, AI assistants leverage artificial intelligence to provide smart and interactive support to users, including virtual assistants, chatbots, and voice-based AI interfaces that can assist with tasks, answer questions, provide recommendations, and automate routine processes. In this context, Atlassian launched its AI solution that deeply understands how your teams collaborate to accelerate work, understanding questions you would ask a teammate and answering them instantly.
Whether it is summarizing a meeting in minutes in Confluence, defining new work in Jira Software, or helping you craft that perfect response in Jira Service Management, Atlassian Intelligence does the heavy lifting for you. In addition, Atlassian Intelligence helps operations and support teams get up to speed faster by:
- Surfacing previously resolved or related issues to empower faster incident resolution;
- Recommending relevant knowledge base articles and related pages to resolve requests and incidents faster.
“Atlassian Cloud is already built on security, meeting global compliance requirements to ensure your data is private, reliable, and secure. Beacon is a step forward in this direction, adding a new layer of security monitoring to modern digital operations.”
What’s Next?
Amid so many innovative solutions being launched day by day, we understand it can be overwhelming to keep up and connect these opportunities with your business challenges. And even if you already have innovative projects popping up in your mind, we know you might lack the bandwidth to launch all your great ideas while you need to keep the business running due to the tech talent shortage, especially in enterprise companies.
At e-Core, we help companies overcome this major barrier by providing cross-functional squads capable of performing strategy, execution, and support of enterprise-level digital transformation initiatives. Our strong culture, evidenced by our 4.9 Glassdoor rating, enables us to attract and retain top talent and showcases our commitment to employee well-being. This positive work environment, coupled with our highly skilled professionals, is the bedrock of providing exceptional business and technical results for our clients, focusing on creating strategies around cost savings and helping our customers choose the right providers.
Whether you need help with Platform Modernization, Application Development, or Digital Operations services, we are the sweet spot between cost-effectiveness and service delivery excellence for accelerating modern digital transformation.
Why e-Core?
Nearshore Delivery Center
cost-effectiveness and
high-quality deliveries.
Cost savings
from 40 to 55%
Offices in NY, delivery centers in Brazil and Mexico
Real-time collaboration
• USA time-zone fit
Multidisciplinary
team
+800 application modernization projects delivered
+100 certifications in cloud computing, application development, web services and project management methods.
Customer-
centricity
“It’s been a really positive experience working with e-Core. They all speak English very well. The hours are great as they overlap with our New York office… The projects we’ve worked on with e-Core, over 30 at this point, they’ve all been completed on time, within budget. I definitely would recommend e-Core to other companies.”
Jordan Saletan, Senior Director in the Technology Management Division at Priceline.
