Nearshore Americas

Nearshore Cloud Development: Making Widespread Adoption a Reality

By Daniel Viveiros

Recently, I looked at the rise in popularity of cloud computing amongst software developers in Nearshore engagements. But questions still remain as to the cloud’s security and reliability, and what the future holds.

Despite the benefits of cloud development in the speed and cost savings it can offer to clients’ businesses, many still view it as too unstable and unreliable to be trusted to host their infrastructures. Though their concerns are, I believe, somewhat warranted, I also believe that with the right considerations and planning, companies can clear this mental hurdle and start leveraging the cloud for their Nearshore projects.

The key to leveraging the cloud is to be smart about how you approach it. It’s not something you can just dive into, and it should be approached in the same way as any other considerable IT investment– with a backup plan in place. Clients need to prepare their architectures for cloud development in such a way that allows for the application to run regardless of any outage that may occur. This includes building out comprehensive disaster recovery plans that will ensure development can continue in the event that resources are unavailable at any given time in the process. As most companies already have such plans in place for their current, on-premise systems, it’s simply a matter of applying the same disaster recovery planning processes to their cloud investments .

The other chief mental roadblock is security – many organizations just aren’t comfortable with shifting all of their corporate data to a public cloud, and instead opt to design private ones. What these clients often fail to realize, however, is that private clouds are in many ways less secure than public ones.  Private clouds rely on the security infrastructure of the company that houses them, while the public cloud is designed with security as a chief consideration.

Moreover, private clouds are often less reliable. So while it’s understandable that clients are wary of investing in the public cloud and are right to worry about their corporate data, many of these fears are in many ways unfounded. Forward-thinking executives have already realized this, and once the holdouts see how successful cloud development has proven for these organizations’ Nearshore development projects, the walls to widespread cloud adoption will come crumbling down.

Looking to the Future

The most important thing to remember about the cloud is not to expect perfection right off the bat. Because it isn’t perfect. Nothing is.

What it is, however, is the most promising new advancement in software development – and, consequently, Nearshore development – to come along in years. Apple’s announcement of iCloud has raised the profile of the cloud to the consumer level, and while it remains to be seen how consumers will respond to the prospect of syncing and managing their content via the hosted model, innovative companies have already seen major ROI benefits from leveraging it in their Nearshore projects. In five years, the question of whether to leverage the cloud in application development projects won’t be a question at all. And in ten years, cloud offerings from the major players will dominate development, while current standard platforms like Java and .Net will be pushed to the background.

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The benefits of the cloud are clear and real. The advantages it offers in terms of speed and cost-savings will eventually change the minds of reluctant IT executives worried about security and reliability issues. And make no mistake: it’s the future of web and mobile development. If you’ve been considering harnessing the power of the cloud for your own Nearshore development projects, there’s simply no time like the present.

This article is the second of a two-part series. The first article is here.

Kirk Laughlin

Kirk Laughlin is an award-winning editor and subject expert in information technology and offshore BPO/ contact center strategies.

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