It’s never been more important for organizations to adapt quickly to unpredictability.
Making smart technology investments now could be the key to handling unexpected change. IT leaders are leaning on the cloud as a way to weather uncertainty and increase resilience, according to a recent Google Cloud survey of more than 1,900 executives.
Many forward-thinking organizations enhance financial resilience by optimizing technology costs, enhancing operations with data and artificial intelligence (AI), and accelerating developer productivity securely.
Here’s how three top organizations are increasing their resilience.
1. Optimizing technology costs
When Southeast Asian digital entertainment company POPS Worldwide migrated its streaming applications to a public cloud environment, the streaming provider initially wanted to combat compute resource limitations and reduce the daily maintenance of its private cloud and locally hosted cloud infrastructure. But after the migration, POPS Worldwide also saw immediate improvements in scalability, performance, and costs—benefits that opened up other areas for opportunity.
POPS Worldwide recently began running its applications with a managed Kubernetes service to enable its workforce to more easily fine-tune its computing resources. Employees’ ability to monitor and control central processing units (CPUs) and memory usage more efficiently immediately reduced backend operational costs by 30%. Managing cloud infrastructure now only requires two full-time developer operations (DevOps) engineers, freeing up more resources to develop new features and high-quality streaming content.
In addition, POPS Worldwide’s traffic volume has grown by about 40 times since its migration in 2019. “We simply couldn’t have achieved this growth if we stayed on our previous infrastructure, because the cost would have been astronomic,” says Martin Papy, chief technology officer. “Before, we ran only eight [virtual machines] (VMs) on the private cloud. Today, we are running more than 100 VMs and can launch new VMs at any time with just a few clicks.”
Customer experience also improved exponentially. Whereas the company previously suffered frequent system errors that disrupted user experience, zero infrastructure system failures have occurred since the migration.
2. Enhancing operations with data and AI
Another way leading companies thrive today is by using data cloud technologies to increase operational efficiency and act on their enterprise data insights in real time with embedded AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities.
For example, Swiss International Airlines (SWISS) built a modular cloud data platform that brings together all information on conditions and resources to drive optimal decisions across various aspects of air travel. While SWISS already had several technology solutions in place, it needed a joint data repository for all crew, passenger, rotation, and technical information.
Rather than trying to “cloudify”—migrate and optimize to the cloud—all of its systems at once, SWISS built a cloud layer on top of its data tools and silos that replicates the minute-to-minute state of its operations. This enabled the airline to get all its relevant data in one place and automate certain parts of the decision-making process with the help of cloud-based AI and ML solutions.
“For the first time, we have a centralized overview of what these variable costs, such as noise charges, air traffic charges, or lease engine costs mean cost-wise on a larger scale,” says Martin Apsel-von zur Gathen, head of operations planning & steering. “This helps us to better quantify decisions and will lead to even more savings.”
This new approach to data-driven decision-making helps SWISS optimize flight rotation planning by automatically matching ideal aircraft to routes based on passenger demand. The new cloud layer also allows the airline to model scenarios based on weather data to help create an accurate view of potential delays and plan accordingly.
Adding to the list of upsides, implementing cloud has helped SWISS maximize revenue and reduce costs of fuel and other expenses like airport noise charges. This has saved the airline a million Swiss francs ( about US$1 million) in the first 14 weeks of operation alone.
3. Accelerating developer productivity securely
When cosmetics giant L’Oreal set out to build a data platform to sync and aggregate all of its internal and external data, it experienced challenges with its existing developer environment. Developers coded locally on physical laptops, presenting security risks and making it difficult to set up new environments. They couldn’t start coding until after they had installed everything they needed—code editors, libraries, and utilities.
Even more challenging, teams worked at various speeds using various methods and development solutions that were each licensed differently. There was no consistent security posture, and cost management was a huge headache.
To solve these issues and strengthen its global developer workforce, L’Oreal adopted fully managed development environments to accelerate developer onboarding and productivity. These cloud-based environments’ advanced security features and customizable environments support multiple integrated development environments (IDEs) and popular developer tools—reducing much of the friction that impedes innovation and slows developers down.
Onboarding periods fell from months to days as developers were able to quickly deploy new environments within a matter of minutes and clicks. And with code no longer stored locally, developers could also access fast environments anytime from browsers or local IDEs. Today, instead of conducting time-consuming peripheral tasks, L’Oreal’s developers now have more time to focus on writing core business logic—and driving the bottom line.
Reimagining resilience with the cloud
Cloud computing holds tremendous potential to help organizations improve experiences, increase agility, drive efficiencies, and unlock opportunities for revenue. At the same time, cloud allows companies and government entities to confront and respond to unpredictable economic conditions in ways that were often impossible until now.
To strengthen your organization’s financial resilience, cloud can be key to a foundation that drives maximum value without slashing budgets or letting go of valuable talent.
Learn more about how businesses are solving for financial resilience with the cloud here.
