According to IDC, by 2022, 90% of all new apps will feature microservices architectures that improve the ability to design, debug, update, and leverage third-party code; 35% of all production apps will be cloud-native. 

Why? 

Depending on how you want the cloud solution to be utilized - as a software, a platform, or infrastructure, the pros and cons may vary, but we’ve gathered five main reasons why custom, cloud-based apps, and software databases are the way to go. 

Optimized operations

When operating an engineering or a catering company and your employees live all over huge megapolis like London or Glasgow and your clients are all over the United Kingdom, forcing them to do everything through your brick and mortar premises is inhumane. Tentacle had cases where the client’s employees had no choice but to do exactly that. Before heading to work, all of them had to waste time going to the head office to pick up the job sheet, request parts, contact suppliers, request relocation, etc. Instead of working with clients, they wasted resources on traveling to the head office to work with the local databases that were only on a couple of computers in their office.

With a Microsoft SQL powered cloud-based solution, the employees' workflow can be drastically optimized - they open their apps in the morning to get their job assignments along with a map detailing the best route to each job. When engineers detect they need a part for a job, the system will instantly alert the parts team in the office. All from their smartphone. You can imagine the time and money saved on this feature alone. 

Real-time reporting

One area we have seen improved in Tentacle’s clients is in real-time reporting and collaboration. Cloud technologies diminish the need to depend on periodic sales reports which are not only time-consuming to compile but also prone to errors.

A well-customized cloud infrastructure ensures that there’s always a steady stream of sales data to the relevant parties. This information is useful when searching for growth opportunities and for making timely adjustments to sales strategies. We will be discussing Big Data and everything a custom app can do with it in Part 5 Big Data, Analytics, and Privacy. 

No physical infrastructure

Traditional servers are expensive to upgrade and you may end up paying for server space that you don’t even use. You want to ensure you have enough storage space and computing power for your existing work, but not too much that you end up paying for unused services.

Dedicated servers are large, expensive, and difficult to maintain. Cloud servers enable you to optimize IT performance without the huge costs associated with purchasing and managing fully dedicated infrastructure.

Cloud companies like Microsoft (with SQL and Azure) and Amazon (with AWS) are investing in the foremost security tools and they are performing more routine security audits. Cloud services operate by the strictest standards in data protection, standards that very few on-premises companies can compete with. For example, Tentacle goes through external cybersecurity audits and certification for the CyberEssentials government standard. 

Flexibility and Scalability

Being able to scale your operation up and down on a whim and react to the demand in real-time is good enough reason to choose a cloud-based solution.

The nature of cloud technology solutions opens the door to additional advantages of cloud computing. It makes it scalable and it’s done automatically. Cloud service providers let you scale up and down seamlessly. This ensures that you are paying only for what you use

Experienced teams like Tentacle, are able to handle the ensuing variability and rapidly scale the level of resources to match the growing demand. For your company, the ultimate goal is to ensure your customers do not experience any dip in the performance of your business which is vital in boosting sales and loyalty. A lot of technologies and their combinations go into ensuring this stability - CDNs, 

Learn more: CDN in times of Corona

Recession and COVID19

We are in the midst of a recession, that is not speculation or grim financial forecasting at this point - that is a fact. Covid19 has sped up what was forecasted for a long time and now businesses and workers face a lot of tough decisions. In this article, we set out to prove that not all of them need to be tough.

Cutting your spending may seem intuitive, but A huge number of companies that lived through have understood that protecting their workforce, managing the top line, and optimizing their business processes are all vital to surviving any crisis. But how do you do that?

Harvard Business Review advises going simultaneously on defense and on offense. We at Tentacle can’t argue with that. First, begin with aggressive moves to reduce costs and increase efficiency. How much of your company’s paperwork and data management is done by hand or in an old Access database? That’s a waste of time and resources that robs your company of flexibility and adaptability that are essential in times of crisis. Tentacle’s clients could easily prioritize the health and safety of their employees and clients just because they had a cloud-based SQL database that allowed them to work-from-home and working remotely without losing any efficiency.

Getting a new IT infrastructure via a cloud-based database might seem like a huge and long-term investment. But waiting to move forward with updating your IT infrastructure and optimizing your business processes via cloud-based solutions may compromise your ability to capitalize on opportunities when the economy rebounds. And the cost of these investments will be lower now, as competition for resources slackens.

The other option is to follow the majority of business and turn to conservatism, talk of “caring about clients and workers” and at the same time laying people off, borrowing money, and ultimately closing down because of ineffective reactive measures that buried their company into the ground. Those people consider spending lots of money on preventive measures like updating your systems and optimizing the workflow an “aggressive” step.

As a result of this “aggressive” step - the update of an old database or getting a completely new, bespoke system, - you can preserve your employees, increase your efficiency, add flexibility and reactivity to your business model. And most importantly - survive any crisis.

Continue to PART 4: “Too custom” and integrations