Even without the current pandemic, the business world would be competitive enough, but the recent global problem has put additional strain on every company around the world. New ways of working and growing had to be discovered and businesses needed to adapt to the new situation as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Naturally, solutions that are both easy to implement and cost-effective were in the spotlight and all eyes turned to technology to provide ways in which companies could continue to work and hopefully prosper. Some examples of such solutions that have witnessed a great increase in use are definitely cloud computing, managed cloud services and open-source platforms. Actually, these are now technology megatrends that drive business growth. We’re going to focus on managed cloud solutions and open source in this text and try to help you understand how you can use them to allow your business to thrive.
Source of growth
All successful businesses utilize managed cloud services and open-source solutions, mainly because the concept allows them to create more agile and flexible environments, achieve more streamlined workflows without spending a lot and, consequently, yield more profit. Namely, open-source technologies feature high transparency levels and are open to inspection, thus enabling you to use and process your own data without being restricted to the capabilities of just one vendor or product. All businesses that want to improve their TTM (time to market), increase revenue and stay future-proof simply have to use such solutions.
Benefits
To begin with, there is transparency. The end-user gets full visibility into the code base and insight into all discussions about how the open-source community creates features and solves bugs. Next, there are global communities that unite around improving open-source solutions and achieve much better results than internal teams. In terms of reliability, we can conclude that the levels of overall reliability are higher, since there is more brainpower tackling open-source code development. Finally, when it comes to money, you need to know that open-source solutions don’t require licensing fees, which means the total cost of deploying a solution will be much lower.
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Managed cloud open source
Using an open-source solution does come with some challenges, which is why using managed open-source resolves is the most efficient way to deal with those issues. What most managed open-source providers do is handle the implementations, maintenance and security processes, which means in-house developers can focus on more revenue-driving activities. This in turn allows companies to move forward and grow faster. Recent studies show that the key driver for the increases in both open-source adoption and cloud enablement is the same concept – boosted business agility and increased ability to innovate faster. Logically, the most successful companies are those that manage to combine managed cloud services with efficient use of open-source.
The model of future growth
We can see that an increasing number of businesses are moving the majority of their computer architecture into the cloud, as they have become more comfortable with hosting their infrastructure and processes in the public cloud. Cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWB) are dominating the market, which means experts in providing efficient AWS professional services are those who can really help your business grow at a faster rate than ever and you can join many renowned companies already using their services and relying on their expertise.
How does it work?
Typically, open-source companies offer hosting and managing their entire stacks in the cloud, while charging subscription fees to end-users, so they can use their services and access various functionality tiers. The open-source company normally offers the most basic service tiers that include the free open core only, while upsell options are offered for paid tiers with progressively higher functionality levels and additional features. Users can spin up and manage their own environment and mitigate the need for experienced employees who can run and maintain a complex structure.
On the other hand, there are certain challenges when it comes to using a cloud services model, one of which is that an open-source company can choose to contribute its code to a foundation that supports open-source projects, which can help the company in question reach wider distribution. However, this can also cause them to lose a certain amount of control over the way users go from open-source usage to commercial feature consumption.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that cloud-based technological advancements will continue to dominate in the years to come and we can expect that that level of usability will also continue to grow. Otherwise, the adoption would be slow and much more likely to wane instead of increase. This can happen if the platforms used are hard to utilize, manage and monitor. Consequently, we can say that those platforms that are most popular and widely used will continue to develop, since that is the logical result of having an increased number of users (and developers). It seems that managed cloud solutions are the way to go, since they can offer solutions to current challenges and allow businesses to enjoy all the whole range of features offered by an open-source product.
