When moving to the cloud, organizations generally transfer existing applications, versus running apps or programs from software downloaded on a physical computer or server in their building.

For the businesses that have already moved to the cloud, they can design smarter apps to take advantage of cloud’s many benefits. Jake Gardner of LogicWorks, a company that offers managed services and cloud computing solutions, recently highlighted five ways to make apps work in the cloud so as to take full advantage of cloud’s many benefits: embracing speed, portability, building loosely, scalability, and easing API friction.

The first tip Gardner suggests is to embrace speed. “A virtue inherent to cloud, the ease with which you can spin up infrastructure becomes the vehicle through which an app can be properly developed incorporating ‘cloudy’ aspects – scalability, elasticity, and redundancy,” he wrote in a recent blog post.

Using cloud from the get-go enables you to take advantage of each of these benefits incrementally, through the development period, into launch, and as your app grows.

Second, as the app scales, there needs to be an ease with which it can be consolidated into a consistent usage pattern into a private or hybrid cloud – which helps minimize excess costs, and allows a company to manage the frontend usage and spikes associated with greater demand, Gardner said.

Third, make sure that all application components are loosely coupled and minimize as many dependencies as possible, he explained. “This allows future platform options to be less limited, especially as applications scale and require either a dedicated approach or a broader cloud integration,” Gardner added.

Fourth, apps can get expensive, especially if they’re not designed with cloud in mind. “Without proper planning, incremental costs rapidly increase as the app grows and encounters spikes. This is due to the additional time, management requirements, and expense in setting up servers, load balancers, and proper network configuration,” Gardner said.

And finally: Native APIs in your app are unavoidable, but they can be the keys to great feature expression. But there are sacrifices being made the more proprietary APIs you integrate, especially where cloud portability is concerned. It is necessary to take note of emerging standards around application portability, Gardner said.

Another benefit of cloud storage is that as companies move to offsite service providers and data center offerings for their data management, they no longer have to rely on costly and antiquated in-house backup systems.

By understanding the scope of the big data project, as well as deriving ultimate goals for that data on both the customer- and services-facing side – as well as the service provider/cloud-facing side – service providers may maximize their costs and productivity.

Read more about ways service providers can make the most of their big data strategies within the cloud here.