How can I leverage new technology in my software?

Leveraging technology should be straightforward. As new technologies emerge every day, a business differential today may be a commodity tomorrow. It’s essential to have the ability to constantly leverage new technologies to remain focused on what is unique to the business. 

What techniques are there to allow businesses to leverage new technology?

Here are examples of how new technology can enhance business capabilities:

• Using Cloud-native strategy to harness the ability to scale and be flexible
•  Serverless architecture creates a way to build and run applications without having to manage infrastructure 
•   3^rd party integration allows integration with newer technology without having to worry about the time and cost of development
• Using Containerisation is an alternative to virtualisation; it evolves encapsulating or packing up software code and all its dependencies so it can run uniformly and consistently on any infrastructure.
• Having the ability to scale up or down the capacity (known as Elastic scaling). Most important in cloud environments, when needing to meet rising demands when required. 
•  Leveraging the power of automation increases efficiency and achieves or sustains a competitive advantage through decreasing errors and expenses.
•  By managing and provisioning infrastructure-as-code instead of through manual processes, you can gain the advantage of faster time to production and market, helping the business be first in a competitive landscape, with improved consistency and less configuration during drafting. 
• Utilising managed databases allows the business to benefit from continuous monitoring and automated scaling delivered by the database provider 
• Modern frameworks create a conceptual and technological support structure defined with specific modules which can serve as a basis for the development of new software 

How can leveraging technology achieve business success? - The benefits

Competitive advantage

We’ve been in the midst of a digital revolution for the last few decades, and businesses that have fully embraced this have been some of those that have seen a vast amount of success. The need to keep up with the digital revolution is directly tied to the complexity and need for speed of the environment today. Those organisations that continue to embrace new technology will set themselves up to better meet the needs of customers and shareholders. 

Michael Porter from the Harvard Business Review says, “new technology changes the nature of competition,” by changing industry structure and, in so doing, altering the rules of competition; creating competitive advantage by giving companies new ways to outperform their rivals; and spawning whole new businesses, often from within a company’s existing operations.

Cost Reduction 

Business is about managing costs. It’s often a delicate balancing act between keeping costs low and maximising earning. Technology plays a crucial role in managing costs through improving operational efficiency: Reducing losses, fewer errors and improved spending. Newer technology advances only increased this operational efficiency, remaining key to cost reduction. 

Managed cloud services help reduce the cost of software by including maintenance, migration, monitoring and optimisation. This allows processes to be offloaded such as cloud backups, and cloud infrastructure maintenance, lightening the workload of the in-house staff to focus on more critical tasks. 

Technology refresh

Rather than using systems until they can no longer function efficiently, businesses can choose to upgrade or replace infrastructure regularly, this process is referred to as ‘Technology refresh’ 

Maintaining legacy infrastructure can be costly, with outdated data centre technology leading to lagging performance, inefficiencies, and administrative overhead. Energy efficiency, failure rates and potential downtime costs are all ways to justify regular hardware updates. 

Mitigation against end-of-life

Not everything has been built to last forever, and this is often the reality with software. Most businesses look to replace their software services regularly when over time, they stop serving the customer as effectively, become slow to change, stop receiving system updates or fall out of warranty (as mentioned in technology refresh). 

When hosts stop issuing updates and patches, software or platforms become more vulnerable to security threats. And, third party tools often lack compatibility. Some of the end-of-life dangers are as shown: 

• Security vulnerabilities
• Software incompatibility 
• Compliance issues 
•   High operating costs
• Poor performance and reliability 
  

The positive outcome is that by leveraging new technology, end of life is often not an issue as software and platforms are updated or replaced before this stage.