The Serverless Revolution: How Cloud-Based Solutions Became The Go-To Standard
AIKIT Digital partnered with Big 4s member KPMG to offer an upcoming workshop this September 15th, where the main topic will be serverless solutions.
Not only IT-related firms (digital marketing, development, etc.) firms could not fathom a world without cloud solutions. But we can dare to state that nowadays there is not a single company that could imagine running their operations without proprietary serverless solutions, or third-party SaaS cloud-based platforms.
Its convenience and cost-effective approach has changed a paradigm that many thought to be written in stone. If we go back less than two decades, the mere thought of having the brains and secret sauce of your company resting in someone else’s hard drives and its logic being executed by a third party’s processors was outrageous. Almost suicidal. The gold standard was to harvest your own server room, preferably within your headquarters, or in some cases in dedicated -company-owned- tech facilities.
WHAT HAPPENED?
With the tech revolution that took place in this century, and the healthy migration to paperless activities topped with the increasing demands of compliance departments of digitally keeping track of everything, owning your own server room became a deal breaker. Just the infrastructure cost alone could break many financial forecasts. And those companies, perhaps, do not even have a tech service as their mainstream revenue. And this created a tricky paradox, of certain things any business needs to scale and comply with, but if they have those things in-house the business may become unprofitable. That’s when cloud providers started filling the void.
The rest of the curve was a lengthy process of cultural adoption, and companies tested live that there was nothing wrong with having their products and data live in third-party servers. It also took some time for cloud service providers to develop and cast the necessary trustworthiness companies needed to see in them. We are talking about Amazon and Google, and the rest that follows.
NO SUCH THING AS SERVERLESS
The term serverless is just an industry convention. Since nothing can be truly serverless. It only means that for the customer, their IT structure is serverless because they do not own, nor operate any server on or out premises. But if we could follow the data path in its entirety, we would end up on a server. For example, a Google server. If this is so…
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS?
One of the most critical upsides of having products and data living in third-party clouds in a serverless fashion is uptime and accessibility. Cloud providers have dozens of security features that not only ensure proper protections are in place to keep customers’ data safe, but if some incident took place in a specific server, they have the mechanisms in place to still serve your data. Doing this on your own servers can be extremely costly, not only structurally but also from a staff and maintenance perspective.
This powerful feature enables something more than critical for businesses: business continuity. For example, if you were a SaaS CRM like HubSpot for example, and the server where the main application dies (this is an oversimplification), hundreds of thousands of customers would lose their entire customer database. Thousands of companies losing potentially millions of dollars of revenue, just for a mishap. Proper serverless environments can easily prevent this.
All of this translates into a third powerful benefit: a great price-performance relation along with a performance-cost ratio. The industry has advanced so much that cloud services have become not only unbeatable but a must-have for any business. Tech at its core or not.
THE WORKSHOP
In partnership with KPMG, we’ll cover the serverless topic from many angles, and professional perspectives.
Make sure you don’t miss it by registering HERE.