It’s easy for businesses to make mistakes when it comes to their application platforms. It happens fairly regularly, like when your go-to grocery delivery application’s payment gateway fails and you can’t check out, or you’re met with downtime and errors during a flash sale on your favourite online retailer.
Although these mistakes are almost always fixed quickly, there is an element of reputational damage when your customers cannot transact or access the service you are providing. Think about all the incidents that happened to major brands and online services over the past five years, and how it impacted you as a customer. One of these incidents happened to a large online retailer in South Africa and it was so bad that people are still talking about it years later, even after improvements to their platform were made in the meantime.
Many of these critical mistakes can be avoided by looking at some of the common points of failure, and by investigating the mistakes that other platform owners have made over the years:
Not planning for growth
A commonly encountered platform mistake is not planning for growth. When a platform is designed, it’s important to consider how it will need to scale to meet the demands of the business in the future. What is working now at a small scale for your current customers might not translate to a larger platform handling increased traffic.
If a platform is not designed to scale, it can lead to performance problems, downtime, and even customer dissatisfaction. Include scaling in your planning from the beginning so that your platform maintains the same great level of service regardless of how many users are on it at the same time.
Not investing in security
A serious mistake from a platform perspective is by underspending on security. In the age of privacy and protecting personal information, your platform cannot reliably serve your customers without proper security protocols and mechanisms in place. A platform that is not secure is vulnerable to attack, which can lead to data breaches, financial losses and damage to the business’s reputation. Even worse, your customer information is exposed because of you, and all the trust you’ve built with those customers goes straight out the window.
It’s essential to invest in security measures to protect the platform and the data it contains. Understand your user’s needs, best practices and current trends to stay on top of security.
Not monitoring performance
It’s also important to monitor the performance of the platform on an ongoing basis. This will help to identify any potential problems early on before they cause major disruptions. By monitoring performance, you can also identify areas where you can improve the platform to make it more efficient and reliable.
With the right monitoring and observability tools, you will be able to understand your platform inside out, including how customers are using your platform, issues that appear, anomalies that crop up and predictions for important platform events.
Not optimising your cloud costs
One of the biggest mistakes that businesses make with cloud platforms is not optimising their costs. The cloud can be a very cost-effective way to run applications, but only if you use it wisely.
Here are some of the reasons cloud cost optimisation is important:
- Saving money: If you aren’t using resources, why are you paying for them? Optimising your cloud estate could result in significant savings because you’ll be using a consumption-based model that is only consuming what it needs.
- Improving efficiency: With cloud computing, you are able to use tools to plan, allocate and optimise your resources for efficiency, so that your resources dynamically meet the platform’s customer demand. This won’t only improve your budget, but will mean customers also have a smooth experience on your platform, regardless of what the load on the platform is.
By learning from mistakes made on other popular platforms, you can avoid making the same ones yourself and instead accelerate growth. By planning for growth, investing in security, monitoring performance and optimising your cloud costs, you can ensure that your platform is reliable, secure and cost-effective.
If you’re looking for a reliable, scalable and secure platform for your business, LSD Open can help. For more information, contact LSD Open.
About LSD Open
LSD was founded in 2001 and wants to inspire the world by embracing OPEN philosophy and technology. LSD is your cloud-native acceleration partner that provides managed platforms, leveraging a foundation of containerisation, Kubernetes and open-source technologies. We deliver modern platforms for modern applications. For more, visit www.lsdopen.io, e-mail info@lsdopen.io or visit us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or GitHub.
- The author, Deon Stroebel, is chief commercial officer at LSD Open
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