Business success is closely tied to how innovative an organisation is. Companies with a digital transformation strategy, for example, grow twice as fast as those without, while 75% of businesses say their digital transformation strategy has led to a significant increase in customer engagement.
Of course, any change to how you serve customers and what you offer them needs to be supported by appropriate applications — whether that's a mobile app for customers or a back-office system for your workforce. Yet many companies struggle to deliver digital transformation because they're held back by their current development environment and legacy systems.
To become a digital enterprise, you need to create an IT environment that will:
Shorten the time to market for new features and apps.
That means introducing "agile" software development methodologies: you work continuously with business users to identify, define and update requirements and deliver new code every few weeks. In this agile world, being able to get new code into production quickly is critical. Google Cloud helps by making it easy to create development, staging and production environments that are identical. That gives you the confidence that when you go live, you won't encounter any nasty configuration surprises.
Re-use existing code like building blocks
Modern IT infrastructures like Google App Engine and Google Cloud API management engine, Apigee, let you write and manage many small blocks of code that each do a particular job, as well as easily call on features in apps written by others. You then call on those code blocks when developing apps that need those features. Furthermore, Google Cloud provides optimised APIs for:
- connecting your apps to common business software like Salesforce and SAP, so you can access and exchange data
- adding features powered by Google Maps, such as route planning
- exploiting Google Cloud pre-trained machine learning solutions which can handle tasks like automatically tagging images and videos
Support rapid, robust deployment
Use technologies such as containerisation to package your application code with everything you need to run it, including the operating system. You can then "ship" that container to any laptop, server, virtual machine or cloud provider that can run containers.
With Google Cloud Kubernetes container orchestration solution, it’s easier and faster to create, update and deploy code — and it typically takes fewer resources to run it, too, so you’ll be able to make your budget go further.
You can also be sure applications won’t break when you move them into production, while Kubernetes’ self-healing architecture, which automatically moves applications to keep them running even if the underlying infrastructure fails, means you don’t have to worry about availability.
Deploy on scalable infrastructure
Available on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), serverless computing makes it easy to spin up new production servers in seconds without having to worry about clusters, nodes and configuration. Your DevOps team can focus on development rather than managing production systems.
Deliver production systems that are secure.
As numerous news stories about data breaches at major companies show, we mustn't sacrifice security when developing custom apps at speed. With Google Cloud, your applications, data and operations are secured every step of the way, from physical security at Google data centre campuses to remote policy enforcement on end-user devices. All data is encrypted, whether it's in transit or being stored, and you can take advantage of data loss prevention and anti-fraud measures for data and user accounts.
Here at Ancoris, we’ve confirmed for ourselves that Google Cloud ourselves provides a strong foundation for innovation. We’ve used it to build numerous award-winning solutions for customers across a wide range of industries. We’ve also made it the platform for our own SaaS solutions, including Ancoris Maps for Housing.
If you'd like to find out more about how Google Cloud can help you accelerate your application innovation, read our blog post about the 4 ingredients for digital transformation success or come and talk to the digital transformation experts in our GCP team.
Article updated December 2020
First published November 2018