It’s increasingly known that today open source software (OSS) is the backbone of any digital transformation project, and it’s undeniable that data is the key in accelerating growth in organisations. It has gone mainstream from being an alternative technology, especially because of its aspects in being collaborative for internal teams, enabling better cross functional implementations that work together seamlessly and its growing adaptation for the modern day applications and use cases. 

IT spending would hit $3.9 trillion this year as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to act as a catalyst for digital transformation in just about every major industry. – Gartner 2021

While adopting the right-fit open source technologies for your enterprise is becoming imperative, it may prove to be tricky and time-consuming at times. Hence, partnering with fitting service vendors and technology providers is key.

In this decision maker’s guide, we will take a look at the core areas of digital transformation leveraged through open source adoption and how it can lead to the best results possible for your IT landscape. First, let us take a look at understanding who this guide is meant for and how it can apply to your organization.

Who is this guide for?

This guide will help anyone looking to be better equipped for the digital-first era. It provides a high-level overview of the top 5 digital transformation areas within your business and how open source, as a part of the IT setup, can support that evolution.  

What are the top benefits of digital transformation with open source?

Most of today’s agile and innovative technology needs are met by open source technologies, and thus over 90% of businesses worldwide are already dabbling with open source or are using it in full-force to better adapt to their competition and be ready for the digitally-driven future. The widely known process for a quick and scalable adaptation of open source is: 

a.) Identifying the problem areas that need to be addressed
b.) The best open source technologies that will work to tackle your issues. This can be achieved by either internal teams’ analysis or getting help from experienced local service vendors

c.) Training your teams on open source and/or hiring the relevant talents 

d.) Hiring reliable consulting, services and support vendors who can partner with your teams – this ensures your transition journey is less experimental and more efficient, saving you time and money

55% of employers most worried about digital skills say innovation is hampered by a lack of key skills – PwC CEO Research Report

So, what are the top things to look for when hiring a consulting and services provider for your open source journey? 

• Ability to provide smarter decision-making with independent and unbiased insights
• Skills to rapidly automate to address a landscape that is constantly changing and scaling
• Designing and architecting skills to address your current and future needs
• Operational support and services so that you can be rest assured 
• Deployment and integration expertise that can help simplify complex issues for you

97% of IT decision-makers today are involved in digital transformation initiatives – Mulesoft DX Trends Survey 

What are the top digital transformation initiatives for organisations? And, how is open source is driving those? 

Businesses’ constant need to evolve will involve a few top primacies – improving their customer experience, following the best-in-game marketing practices, changing their internal and outward business practices, beating competition, going largely digital and more. 

As a trusted open source thought leader, Ashnik has been providing relevant regional and industry specific consulting and solutions on open source for many large businesses. With our core expertise in open source, and being in the business for over 12 years handling over 200 top organisations to digitally transform; we have had the privilege to identify and successfully implement solutions for the core digital initiative areas in organisations. Sharing some of our key tech insights so far: 

• Building new-age Database platforms:

With higher demands of better data management in the digital economy, businesses are evolving and setting new data managing benchmarks. Building open source solutions for data management start with adopting scalable and agile Database technologies on platform of your choice – to collect, store, and analyse large amounts of data from different sources without sacrificing governance, security and management. 

Modern data challenges require modern databases for better dexterity – let’s take a look at some of the top open source based Database platforms that are being used by businesses today:

1. PostgreSQL: Considered the world’s most advanced open source relational database, it offers its users a vast (and rising) number of functions. Helping programmers to create new applications, admins to better protect data integrity, and developers to build resilient and secure environments. Its ability to manage data, regardless of the database size, makes it a favourite with Apple, Instagram, NASA, Spotify, Skype, IMDB and many more organisations.
2. MongoDB: a document-oriented NoSQL database used for high volume data storage, MongoDB offers the ease of implementation with reliable performance, high availability, and automatic scaling. Known as the database that backs mission critical applications on cloud or on-prem, MongoDB is used by Google, Forbes, Gap, Barclays, KPMG, and Toyota among other top players
3. Redis: Renowned for super-fast access to data by relying on in-memory storage, Redis delivers sub-millisecond response times, enabling millions of requests per second for real-time applications in industries like gaming, ad-tech, financial services, healthcare, and IoT. Twitter, GitHub, Pinterest, Snapchat, Craigslist, Flickr and many other popular companies use Redis today. 
4. Elasticsearch: Being a highly scalable, open-source full-text search and analytics engine, Elasticsearch allows to store, search, and analyze massive volumes of data quickly and in near real time. It is predominantly used to power applications that have complex search features and requirements, little wonder companies like Wikipedia, GitHub, NY Times, Facebook and more trust Elasticsearch for their various use cases.

Here’s an example of how, one of Ashnik’s clients, a top global insurance provider in Southeast Asia, wanted to ensure an enhanced web presence to drive better (CX) customer experience. We helped them design a highly available architecture using PostgreSQL database for multi-geo replication and availability. Through our design, implementation and support post-implementation, the customer was able to achieve their goal of having high-availability of Databases situated in two different geographies, which earlier caused choppy network and lower bandwidth. 

• Building a high-speed data pipeline

What does it mean to build a data pipeline?

A data pipeline is a set of actions that bring raw data from different sources and move the data to a terminus for storage and analysis. A pipeline may also include filtering and characteristics that offer resiliency against failure.

New age businesses can look at open source solutions as a futuristic way to handle blazing fast gigabyte data streams in a manner that allows for scalability, flexibility and agility without sacrificing optimum throughput and latency. When a lot rides on building out the most robust, least expensive and innovative architecture, we offer optimum solutions that seamlessly thread data engineering, input and analytics through to delivery. 

Let’s take a look at how Ashnik played a critical role in designing the entire log aggregation and monitoring platform for a Fortune 500 Fintech – this global provider of banking and financial applications for emerging banks provides core banking as a service. Moving to a centralized log aggregation platform from different ones for each bank was a critical challenge for the customer. The client had to provide stringent uptime SLA for the banking operations and hence had to setup a highly scalable, versatile infra monitoring platform. Ashnik designed, deployed and operated the entire monitoring infrastructure using the Elastic stack and automated the deployment of 1000+ NGINX instances using Ansible.  

• Enabling the Kubernetes platform

With the Kubernetes platform, you can successfully build new capabilities and scale up with new open source technologies along with the orchestration capabilities of Kubernetes. It enables you to work on demanding or complex applications that can help effectively deliver greater storage, global load balancing efficiencies, order management, and greater self-healing abilities. Through varying open-source solutions, different types of administrative tasks can be automated, reducing manual distractions as businesses can focus on rapid innovation and managing data effectively.

How Ashnik worked with one of the top banks in Mongolia to help successfully expand its reach by tying up with different telecom vendors in the country – working closely with the bank’s application team, we reviewed its microservices architecture, helped them adopt the Kubernetes platform, provided consulting support, and trained its team. Thus, the bank now deploys and scales out its applications on varying cloud platforms. It is also equipped to integrate its offering with the telecom vendors when the need arises. 

• Creating a Hybrid and Multi-cloud platform

Evolving your business abilities to incorporate the flexibility of managing infrastructure across hybrid or multi-cloud platforms is becoming a must. With open source solutions you can opt for a hybrid cloud architecture by blending proprietary infrastructure along with a public cloud service. Adopting a multi-cloud platform strategy works for best of breed services, avoidance of single provider lock-in and advantages of price. We consult, design and build the best infrastructure solutions for your cloud goals – be it cloud migration, adopting hybrid cloud or multi-vendor setup. Enabling you to have a powerful IT environment swiftly and effortlessly.

81% of enterprises have at least one application or a segment of their computing infrastructure in the cloud today. 13% of enterprises with over 1K employees have migrated their entire IT environment to the cloud as of today. – Gartner report 2021

Explore this detailed guide on how to accelerate your multi and hybrid cloud goals and its various challenges, so you can dodge the complexities and instead focus on staying ahead of the game.

Ashnik closely worked with a world leader in corrective lenses, who wanted to adopt a Hybrid cloud strategy – to successfully transition its key workloads to Azure. Ashnik played an important role in fine-tuning the application, re-architecting the database deployment, and designing a plan to transition to the Cloud. Ashnik provided the operational support during this entire phase. 

• DevOps and Automation

As a business, you might have experienced times when your IT system became dysfunctional, frequently crashed due to overloading, or became untrackable. To help overcome this problem, you must understand the need for a reliable and resilient DevOps and Automation architecture. With the right kind of stable architecture, businesses are capable of creating an environment, where automation is seamless and collaborative and the ROI is aligned to a few core business objectives with faultless deployment. 

Ashnik’s customer who is a top bank in Singapore, wanted to strengthen its footprint across Asia by ensuring to provide the highest quality of customer experience – The Bank had several product offerings that were being accessed through over 200 domains. To improve its content delivery experience, they migrated to Cloudflare. The customer also wanted to integrate the logs from Cloudflare’s cloud platform to the bank’s platform. Ashnik designed a solution that integrated logs to AWS S3 and pulled them into the ELK Stack by providing them with analytical ability. With this solution, there were multiple levels of security checks that were implemented across various cloud providers which further exemplified the integrity of logs that were being ingested by the system. Ashnik design and deployment solution exceeded the bank’s expectations.

In Conclusion:

We hope you find this decision maker’s guide for digital transformation through open source helpful and insight driven. The above points throw light on the benefits of digitally transforming IT and how thus your business can successfully progress through the adoption of open source services.

Ashnik represents a broad range of open source technologies covering data management (relational, NoSQL, real-time, log management, data in motion), application modernization (Kubernetes, analytics, and data visualization), automation, scaling & cybersecurity. We have replicable use cases and repeatable frameworks that could be leveraged to solve our customer pain points. 

Talk to Ashnik’s experts to better understand consulting and solutions for your open source adoption. On-board the right technologies and offerings for your enterprise to get future-ready! Inquire now.