Businesses have wanted to have rapid provisioning, elasticity, self-service, and use cloud services for their advantages. However, despite the recent digital revolution, mission-critical apps are still hosted on the on-premise physical servers. How can one expect businesses to bridge the gap between the two worlds?

The actuality is that moving these mission-critical apps is itself a critical job. The security and availability demanded by these apps in a cloud desktop environment are still under construction. For this reason, enterprises use Cloud Hosting Solutions for only non-critical apps.

However, we think that times are changing in the cloud world. As cloud solutions mature, new technologies are emerging to meet the demands of mission-critical apps. Realistically, it won’t take much longer for clouds to support every business app, which can benefit in terms of cost, efficiency, and agility.

So how private cloud hosting solutions can support the mission-critical apps in a shared or virtualized setting? How can they journey from this to that –and before their competitors?

Firstly, they need to come up with an application-centric and not infrastructure-centric approach. This means that they would need to build personalized Cloud Desktop environments to deliver robustness demanded by mission-critical apps. There are a few key steps that can help you here:

Take New Approach to Offer Availability

Nothing is more important than availability when it comes to mission-critical apps. Availability is the biggest issue between enterprises and cloud hosting solutions. Recent upgrades in Microsoft Azure and other cloud services have made public and private cloud solutions readily available to use. However, the traditional hardware-based approach doesn’t map well to the elastic cloud environments.

This is where the software-defined availability comes into play. With such an approach, the application doesn’t have to face failure-prevention and recovery options, offering high availability with the help of hardware used in a dynamic cloud environment. More importantly, this can be achieved without having anything re engineered, reducing the time, cost, and risks that come with mission-critical apps. To meet the mission-critical apps’ requirements, availability can be deployed as a service, and change as the time passes.

Strong Orchestration Capabilities

Another essential aspect of mission-critical apps is the ability to orchestrate cloud resources. This factor ensures that every data roaming freely in the cloud environment ends up where it is supposed to be, at the right time.

Let’s get this out of the way first that not all mission-critical apps have the same requirements. Some days, they can be mission-critical, while on others, not so much. For instance, it is essential for a payment processing system to keep it up and running during the holiday season, or financial service application at the quarter-end. Enterprises should have the option of scaling up and down the application based on their needs, whenever they want.

This indicates the shift from the mindset of “application customization” to “application configuration,” with the configuration being rather dynamic in nature. Again, with this kind of approach, you can minimize or eliminate the need to re-engineer your application.

When considering fault tolerance, maintaining it in an on-premise data center means that you would need to deploy the application on fully redundant hardware, which can be costly. In a cloud environment, you can deploy fault tolerance only when you need that level of availability.

Once you don’t need fault tolerance, you can throw back the application to a non-FT infrastructure without interruptions. This can save you in terms of cost, optimize resources, and offers availability whenever you need it.

Open Source Technology

Reduced costing is one of the most appealing reasons to shift your mission-critical apps to the cloud. Using technologies that come with extreme licensing costs, support fees, or any other expenses challenges that advantage.

You can leverage the open-source technologies and architectures to save yourself from expenses. Technologies like Openstack, Linux, and KVM can help you reduce some of the costs while offering the flexibility of building innovative cloud environments for mission-critical apps. The network of vendors solving these issues is getting mature with each passing day.

Closing the Gap

Cloud hosting providers and enterprises embracing the strategies to accommodate mission-critical apps are already one step ahead of others. Their success depends on embracing new tools and technologies to meet mission-critical applications’ requirements while effectively managing risks and budgets. To close this gap completely, the latest cloud hosting solutions are still working.