The global COVID-19 pandemic spurred cloud adoption to new heights. Chief information officers looked to public cloud providers to help them support newly remote employees, provide customers with the exceptional digital experiences they wanted and enhance business agility in a time of rapid transformation. But to make the most of investments in the cloud — especially over the long term — you need the right strategy. Your cloud needs will change with time. Being locked in to your relationship with a single cloud vendor entails losing freedom of choice, flexibility and potential cost advantages.
Taking a cloud-native approach lets you move applications to the environment that best suits your business needs, regardless of whether that means running them in your own data center, on a single public cloud vendor's infrastructure or across multiple public clouds. Containerized applications built on Kubernetes can run in any public cloud or on-prem. And with HCL Software's Solution Factory (SoFy), it’s easy to build cloud-native enterprise software on Kubernetes. SoFy also makes it near effortless to move your applications to a new host whenever you have a reason to do so.
HCL Software's solutions were created so that clients could choose the cloud that aligns with their business strategy instead of building a business strategy around a single cloud provider's offerings. They were expressly designed to make it simple to move workloads from one platform to another. Plus, this can all be done within a self-service dashboard that provides a consistent and easy-to-manage administrative experience across all cloud environments.
Dismantling Roadblocks: How HCL SoFy Removes Barriers to Application Portability
HCL SoFy is a cloud-native software catalog that includes more than 50 enterprise software products and over 2,000 REST API endpoints. These cloud-ready components are packaged together with SoFy's unique monitoring and administrative tools. Instead of turning to your cloud vendor for services such as request routing or access control, you can rely on SoFy's built-in capabilities. This frees you from technical dependence on a single cloud vendor.
"From the outset, one of our core design principles when we were building the SoFy platform was to provide a wrapper of services around our products," explained Alex Mulholland, HCL Software's chief platform architect. "This insulates you from being forced to use vendor-provided services. Of course, you can still use them if you want, but SoFy gives you an entirely portable alternative."
One of SoFy’s key benefits is ease of use. You can install any HCL Software cloud-native solution you want, and SoFy will handle the entire process for you with just a single click. Moving to another cloud provider — or repatriating software back into your data center — is equally simple. Rather than hiring engineers with new single cloud vendor-specific skills, your organization can take advantage of the fact that SoFy is the same in every cloud. Your team will never need to spend time learning the nuances of a different version of Kubernetes, either.
This significantly reduces the amount of time and administrative effort you'll need to invest in building a multicloud environment. Instead, you can position each of your workloads wherever you’d like so that you can minimize costs, maximize application performance and ensure that you can meet any data-residency requirements you might have for regulatory compliance. And you can do it without incurring excessive development costs.
"The major cost involved in changing software is development," said Bill Swatling, HCL Software group product manager. "What you're investing in is expertise, and with SoFy, you don't have to do as much of that. That makes application portability accessible to large numbers of businesses that otherwise couldn’t afford the people."
Empowering Cloud Customers by Giving Them Freedom of Choice
Unlike consumer-facing applications, most enterprise software can't meet business needs as it is off the shelf. Instead, it's common for companies to invest as much as two to three times the initial purchase price of their solution in extensive customizations. If these customizations aren't portable, the enterprise stands to lose the value of the investments it’s already made in transforming software to meet business needs.
"With SoFy, all the investments that you've made, not just in software, but in customizations, they can be moved wherever you want," Swatling said. "Say that right now you have a great deal with AWS, but they raise their price next year. You can switch to Azure and keep the application the same exact way, with all the customizations. Everything moves over."
Imagine the pricing power this will give you when it's time to renegotiate your cloud contract next year. Instead of being at the cloud provider's mercy because you’re tied to their environment, you can move your Kubernetes platform whenever your needs or requirements change.
Furthermore, the full SoFy catalog is available to support three deployment models, all of which equally enable application portability. You can deploy the software yourself into your own self-managed Kubernetes environment, you can work with a business partner who can host your software and manage it on your behalf, or you can choose HCL Now, an easy-to-consume cloud-native-as-a-service offering in which one of HCL Software’s Kubernetes experts will manage your software for you in the cloud of your choice.
In every case, SoFy enables freedom, flexibility and the power to choose.
Want to learn more about HCL SoFy and HCL Now? Interested in discovering more of the benefits of cloud-native computing? Visit the HCL Software website today.
