To keep up with rapidly evolving customer expectations, organisations must tackle the underlying barriers to digital transformation and ensure low latency in their applications
Digital transformation has come a long way over the past decade. When the need first emerged to meet demands from customers for a more digital experience, most organisations took the simplest and least disruptive approach: deploying a series of new, greenfield digital applications.
While many companies might have called this digital transformation, in reality it wasn’t. Real transformation requires replatforming of the underlying infrastructure, but the significant costs and complexities of doing this were, for a long time, a major deterrent. That is until cloud-native businesses started outpacing and out-innovating incumbents by offering better customer experiences.
The realisation of the importance of cloud infrastructure to core business agility came about at the same time as Covid-19 upended the world, accelerating the urgency for real digital transformation. Suddenly, the life-and-shift model was no longer feasible; businesses had to start thinking about application modernisation – and fast.
“The pandemic has driven transformation at an unprecedented magnitude and changed how businesses interact with their customers,” says Udi Gotlieb, vice-president of product marketing at Redis. “When you look at how cloud-driven companies use DevOps practices, agile development technology and microservices to break the silos between operations and development, legacy organisations can’t achieve that kind of agility on their existing models and infrastructure.”
Amid the acceleration of digital services, amplified by the Covid-19 crisis, it is now business critical to not only build new services quickly, but also to make sure they are delivering the best possible user experience. Latency is the new outage – it is costing businesses while their cloud-native competitors are delivering rapid speed for digital consumers.
Consumer expectations are higher than ever and they are increasingly correlated to how quickly applications can respond to customer demands. If they can’t do this in less than 100 milliseconds, consumers won’t waste time and will look for alternatives, making latency a crucial consideration in application modernisation. Technology is just one part of the equation, however.
“Any business can bring in new technology but if people don’t know how to use it and companies don’t acclimate the process around it, they won’t be able to innovate,” says Allen Terleto, field CTO at real-time data platform Redis. “To break through the complicated barriers to genuine digital transformation, companies have got to tackle people, process and technology.”
From a people perspective, developers want to use the technology they like using, yet the mainstay databases over the past five or six decades tend to be ranked at the bottom of user surveys. Redis, on the other hand, has consistently been named the most loved in-memory database. By giving talented developers a tool that is simple, powerful and fast, they’ll be empowered to be more innovative.
When it comes to processes, Redis Enterprise simplifies and automates processes that site reliability engineers (SREs) and DevOps people will need to otherwise manage manually. That includes deploying multi-tenant and geo-distributed services. Developers and engineers do not need to write their own conflict resolution logic or patch every different application to meet their enterprise SLAs. They can simply choose the right model and deploy uniformly with operational excellence.
Finally, Redis’s technology is built for the digital age. Because legacy relational databases were created 50 years ago, when the cost of RAM was very high, they had to focus on reducing infrastructure costs as a first principle of their design, instead of simplifying data access and optimising for performance. Redis was built for multi-model data access and in-memory speed as a first principle, leveraging RAM that is now viable due to exponentially reduced costs. Companies get the speed and access they need without the complexity.
“Our customers are empowered for successful digital transformation across all three dimensions,” Terleto says. “Redis’s simplicity and community gives people confidence to move fast, experiment and drive innovation. Our cloud-native real-time data platform meets customers where they are today and where they are going tomorrow as we progress towards a digital-first economy.”
For more information, visit redis.com
Promoted by Redis
