In 2017, McAfee found that an average enterprise uses 464 custom applications. A large enterprise — a company with over 50,000 employees — uses 788 custom apps! The more applications you have, the more complex your application environment is. This means that you are more susceptible to outages. So, the tolerance for downtime is impossibly low. Mission-critical applications must be available at all times.

At 8:54 pm on November 1, 2020, a customer of HDFC bank complained on Twitter that the bank’s services like internet banking and ATMs were down. More customers started raising similar issues over the next couple of hours, saying that UPI, credit card, and debit card transactions weren’t working either. Finally, at 11:55 pm, the bank confirmed that one of their data centers faced an outage. “Restoration shouldn’t take long,” they promised.

The cloud is driving enterprise digital transformation. Gartner predicts that by 2026, public cloud spending will exceed 45% of all enterprise IT spending, a 2.5x growth from 2021. Enterprises globally are accelerating application modernization, embracing the cloud. This is giving rise to a few key trends. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) adoption is on the rise. So, organizations are using applications whose implementation/infrastructure they have little or no control over.