Organizations are in the midst of an application explosion. Irrespective of sector or audience, they are being defined by how fast they can deliver modernized apps and services that differentiate their business and enhance the user experience. There are, in essence, six steps that enterprises should take to create the ideal environment to master the app explosion transforming their businesses.

1. Completely secure – no matter where an application is deployed. In a world where applications and data exist as much outside the corporate network as they do within it, that means a new approach to security, one where it is intrinsically built in and not bolted on. Modern-day security requires an investment shift away from trying to prevent breaches at all costs and towards building intrinsic security into everything – the application, the network, essentially everything that connects and carries data.
2. Consistent management of applications, regardless of where they’re deployed. To remove the need for specific skills, IT needs to be able to manage applications across different types of cloud, from data center, to public, to the edge. This needs to be agile, efficient and automated to ensure that IT teams can run applications and their environments in a consistent manner. Having this ability means having the visibility, operations, automation, security and governance to manage and operate their systems and apps, even across multiple cloud environments.
3. Ensure applications are portable from cloud to cloud without refactoring. There are multiple ways to move applications across developer platforms, without costly refactoring  – from re-platforming to adopting a multi-tier approach, which sees the application split (for instance, with a front-end in a public cloud, and the data kept on-premises), to building cloud-native applications from scratch, or deploying a software-as-a-service version. The key to all of these is having consistency across operations and infrastructure.
4. One set of tools, for one set of environments – dovetailing with consistent management, having one set of tools, on a common platform, to build and manage the entire application portfolio across all environments removes the need for vendor or cloud specific teams, reduces complexity – and provides the necessary visibility required across multiple environments.
5. Promoting collaboration between developers and operations – Developers need access to the tools and environments that are going to help them do their jobs. Operations teams are looking for a straight way to manage – continual changes are the stuff of operations nightmares. The risk is that if operations and developers cannot collaborate, then the latter will acquire their resources outside of the enterprise IT structure, leading to potential security risks. With applications so critical to business success, getting developers and operations on the same page is now an absolute imperative.
6. Empower developers to build and deploy applications to any public cloud – Users want experiences rapidly, and the delivery of the applications and services providing those interactions needs to match that pace. To deliver that, developers need a common platform that means they can build applications anywhere and then deploy them in any environments. Kubernetes is clearly the preferred platform, delivering the operation of an elastic web server framework for cloud applications.  81% of respondents wanted IT operations to provide developer-ready Kubernetes, including cluster infrastructure and Kubernetes lifecycle management.