The demand for digital services is at an all-time high irrespective of domains. Be it banking, retail, healthcare, entertainment, or education, there is an accelerated push from customers to transition into digital-first business transactions. Businesses were feeling the heat to upgrade their legacy technology into high-end digital applications for quite a while but the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed chaos into the journey.
Digital transformation initiatives, which usually matured over a period of several years, had to be completed and made market-ready in a span of a few weeks. When physical movement was restricted and social distancing norms came into play, digital became not just an option for consumers, but a new way of life. The new normal powered by digital is likely to stay and this means enterprises must make their digital applications muscled up to meet the demand.
As far as next-gen applications are concerned, the 2 key pillars of success in a rapidly evolving digital-first market are performance and scalability. Let us examine some reasons why either of them is important:
Why is performance important?
Let’s take the example of banking. Studies predict that the market share of online banking worldwide will be worth USD 30.1 billion by 2026. It is an indicator that more users will be relying on online banking facilities by leveraging apps made by both banks as well as other financial entities and fintech companies. It is likely that billions of transactions may happen simultaneously via banking apps and without geographic or demographic boundaries.
To facilitate a seamless transactional experience, it is important for banks and fintech organizations to have their next-gen applications capable of handling high usage volumes, and to do that they need to focus on improving performance. Banking is just a popular example. If we look at any industry like e-commerce, online entertainment, or education, there will be a rapidly growing base of internet-based transactions happening through applications. Hence, the performance of these apps needs to be at its best to facilitate better customer experiences.
It doesn’t matter if an app is simultaneously used by one hundred or one billion users, the experience each user gets should be the best and without any performance glitch.
Why is scalability important?
While ensuring that every consumer or user of new-gen applications has a consistent experience is important, it is equally important to allow each user to leverage the app to its fullest. For example, if the app in discussion is an online storage service, then every user would require on-demand scalability of the storage capacity as his or her needs grow. The growth in storage capacity may be free or paid for depending on the model of business that the enterprise is engaged in.
Storage is just one element out of several entities that require high-level scalability depending on the growth of the business. Scalability may also be needed in terms of resources such as computing power, number of user profiles, number of availability zones or locations, and much more. The COVID-19 pandemic was an eye-opener for the level of disruptions that may happen in any business.
Your volume of transactions may increase exponentially or contract in a similar fashion depending on market conditions. Hence, next-gen apps need to have the flexibility to scale up or down according to the needs of the business.
Now that the need for performance and scalability is undeniably established, enterprises need to shift their application development initiatives into models that facilitate seamless performance and scalability. One of the best ways to achieve this combination is to transition into cloud application development. Studies estimate that the global cloud application development market would be worth over USD 166.8 billion by 2024. This rapid growth is a result of several enterprise leaders realizing the true potential of cloud application development.
With cloud application development, enterprises can free up their IT workload considerably and leverage services from trusted cloud vendors for building market-ready next-gen applications. They can focus more on building awesome end-user experiences and revenue realization initiatives and not on enhancing and upgrading their technology ecosystem.
Some of the key advantages that businesses moving their application development to the cloud are:
- Enhanced performance and scalability on demand
- Improved cost-efficiency
- Eliminating maintenance and infrastructure costs
- Better availability across target geographies
Enabling higher performance and flexibility of scale is vital to help businesses fulfill the dynamic needs of today’s digital-savvy consumers. Their traditional application development ecosystems and initiatives may prove to be less successful in helping to mitigate this challenge. The path to success will largely depend on how efficiently they can leverage the cloud to deliver on these promises on performance and scalability.
Get in touch with us to explore how your next-gen apps can be built to guarantee seamless performance and scalability for end-users.