Accelerating Cloud Native for Optimized Application Experiences

Today, application experience practically is the brand. More and more, consumer loyalty is inspired by a company’s app: its speed, features, capabilities, and ease of use. And that’s true in everything from healthcare and retail to government and education.  

Increasingly more transactions are taking place through modern distributed cloud-native applications spanning every industry.  Built to take advantage of cloud computing frameworks, cloud-native applications must meet the expectations of mission critical businesses for feature velocity, security and consistent performance. Users are looking for optimized experiences from their apps—primarily, how fast does the application execute, scale, and how quickly new features can go to market.   

Cloud native is a software approach in which apps are built of microservices and run in the cloud. It allows for faster feature updates and upgrades, while minimizing failures. This accelerates optimized user experiences. And because cloud native is a simpler operating model and the thinner components of apps are scaled across the internet, the task of management and operations to support the applications becomes simpler.   

CIOs still need to consider all the potential problems that occur when we pull apart applications. App components are being sprinkled across on-prem data centers, public and private cloud, mobile devices, and the edge. This is done for performance and agility reasons, but cost and governance over different portions of data can also play a role. 

Businesses also need the operational efficiency to monitor, observe, and run their apps transparently, simply, and securely across multiple clouds.   

Cisco’s application-first infrastructure vision is centered on helping customers accelerate to and solve problems for the modern cloud native applications world. As more companies are shifting the way they’re delivering apps to more distributed architectures, Cisco can help with the challenges they face by providing connectivity, security, and observability solutions across all layers of the stack – from the application and API to the infrastructure.    

Cisco is helping customers transition in three ways: innovation, choice, and trust.  

Innovation 

Cisco is providing modern technology platforms that provide an essential control point for customers. This allows them to get more value from cloud investments by simplifying operations, continuously optimizing their multicloud environments, and accelerating service delivery to address business needs.  

For example, Cisco’s full-stack observability solution provides a framework for visibility, insights and actions across all layers of the stack. Cisco AppDynamics provides the infrastructure monitoring to have full visibility into applications, and  Cisco ThousandEyes’ digital experience monitoring sees into end-to-end networks across any network service provider and across compute layers, both physical and cloud native. Cisco Intersight provides a cloud operations platform for orchestrating applications and infrastructure across public cloud and on-premises environments. These tools enable CIOs to begin adopting cloud without massive capital investment and ensuring the best application experiences.  

Choice and Trust  

Cisco is a cloud-neutral company so customers can choose where apps and data need to sit, how they are monitored and secured, and how to implement cloud native technologies. Cisco protects customer data and provides customers choice of how to operate and consume cloud-native technologies in the way that works best for them. 

There are plenty of challenges CIOs face when they start to think about migrating to the cloud—agility, security, and delivering the best application experiences. Cisco’s application-first infrastructure vision is all about solving these challenges and working with customers to help them succeed in their cloud adoption.  

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Vijoy Pandey is VP and CTO of Cisco Cloud Platform and Solutions Group.