Because of the pandemic, many companies have been working in "degraded mode". They have also become aware of the resilience opportunities offered by the cloud. Here are several types of cloud architecture for greater flexibility.
The pandemic has had a major impact on many projects. Companies must therefore prioritize them according to their objectives, specificities and constraints.
Here are three cloud architecture models that are likely to emerge in the coming months:
Serverless: a cloud architecture designed for change
Serverless computing has gone from being a good idea to a relevant alternative. Most public cloud providers offer it for containers, databases and artificial intelligence.
The advantage of this option, in a post-pandemic world, is the speed of deployment and change. In short, companies have an architecture designed for change.
Federated Identity Management
Organizations need to provide access to a multitude of online programs and applications to the right people. Hence the need to integrate solutions that maximize the use of digital identities for multiple users.
Single Sign On (SSO) and its variant Federated Identity are emerging as the "norm". Centralized security management (or federated security) of distributed resources is an emerging concept, but one that is becoming increasingly relevant.
Federated Identity Management (FIM) is a set of agreements and standards enabling the portability of identities across multiple enterprises and applications to support a large number of users.
This is the major difference between SSO and Federated Identity. Whereas SSO allows a single authentication credential to access different systems within the same organization, FIM provides a single access to multiple systems in different companies.
Containers distributed
Again, this is not a new concept, having been talked about since around 2017. But the current situation should encourage its adoption.
Microservices have become essential in a world where services must support a multitude of platforms and applications. Containers, like Docker, enable much more efficient use of resources, better isolation and greater portability than virtual machines.
But a monolithic architecture is not scalable or flexible. Hence the idea of taking advantage of the federation of containers (or distributed containers). They can operate autonomously or in clusters, and can be run anywhere, in or out of the cloud.
This cloud architecture means greater flexibility. The faster you can move processing, for example from one cloud to another or from one datacenter to another, the more options you have in the event of a crisis.
