Enterprises are competitively spending on IT solutions far and wide. To meet the evolving business requirements and ease out the operation, businesses are largely relying on enterprise applications. More and more businesses are finding their thriving ground on business-appropriate applications as well.
The proposed IT spending on a global scale is about to hit $3.8 Trillion in 2019. Substantially, $457 Billion is evidently anticipated exclusively on enterprise application expenses in the same period. This reveals the growing impact of enterprise applications across the globe. Yet, developing an effective enterprise application involves a lot of complex challenges.
Let’s check the challenges involved in enterprise app development and its solution.
The winning combination of an enterprise application is the effective participation of different business and technical components. Also, it must be equipped to solve different business problems without any hassles. Therefore, a business application should possess certain characteristics. Building such an application is quite challenging. Let’s see what the hurdles are
Application Scalability:
Technology is evolving every moment in this digital world. New enterprise-solutions are crafting out with advanced tech-capabilities either. The new-age technologies like Artificial intelligence, Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, etc, are stealing the business performance.
Hence, in enterprises, the users are eagerly waiting to simplify their operation with new technologies. This demands time-appropriate flexibility and scalability to accommodate new technologies.
As the business grows, the need to incorporate additional talent resources, deal more customers and manage extra inventory stacks increases. Therefore the enterprise applications that cater to the smooth operation of the business must able to scale up/down as the situation demands.
Solution:
A futuristic application development approach can mitigate this issue. Adopting modular-architecture and employing cross-platform technologies such as CSS3, HTML5 will ease out the process. Besides, it ensures better scalability and flexibility to applications.
Application mobility:
Mobility holds an important role in deciding the productivity-quotient of businesses today. The term mobility refers to the easy use of professional/personal devices for a business function. Also, it is not just about the availability of applications across different devices, but also the accessibility of data anywhere and anytime.
To illustrate, the same functionalities that an employee can access from the office desktop must replicate in their smartphone. Plus, the same amount of data exchange should make possible either. This requires meticulous teamwork and advanced software technology components.
Solution:
Thus, enterprise application developers should integrate smooth data exchange gateways. Yet, application security cannot be compromised at any point. Moving with a hybrid approach that helps to deliver native features to the devices. Also, using frameworks like NativeScript add more flexibility to the applications.
Application Security:
Enterprise applications are at stake since BYOD policies were introduced. It made the business application more vulnerable to external attacks and data breaches. However, as productivity and employee satisfaction comes as a thumping demand, enterprises have to keep work-mobility policies in the business. As applications began to travel far beyond the in-house security measures, it demands advanced security strategies.
Further, to mitigate the security challenges, enterprises implement user access controls and data encryption models across the network. But, building too many walls makes the whole process cumbersome.
Solution:
Hence, the only option that can help the business to face this challenge is implementing a stringent security policy. Right from the point of application design, it is necessary to incorporate security protocols that suit the business.
Employing and updating advanced security measures such as firewalls, encryption protocols all across the network and application would help significantly. Also, business-appropriate security software has to deploy to protect web applications and cloud-based applications. Moreover, make sure all the measures are updated and frequency monitored.
Changing Business Requirement
Enterprises are prone to rapid shifts. It may be a makeshift movement from a strategy to another or permanent relocation from one platform to another. As technology opens new strategic doors, enterprises have to reform themselves to accommodate new tools and trends. It involves additional cost, time, effort and a lot of unsolicited business troubles. Hence these challenges pause as a threat before enterprises and application developers.
Solution
Incorporating modular architecture all across the design would be a solution for this periodic change in business requirements. This helps to alter the relevant component without disturbing the business functions.
Big Data Management
Dealing with business data is a mammoth challenge for enterprises. Daily, the piles of data exchanged across the network are uncountable. Yet, the importance of data in business is unignorable either. This plethora of data is the driving fuel of business.
Further, it increases the storage requirement, strong network, and demands more spacious data centers. Subsequently, it elevates the business running cost that includes data storage cost, maintenance expense, and security overheads.
Solution:
Relying on software platforms such as Hadoop is the best solution to affordably distribute data. It provides the best data management solution with assured data security. In addition, using a cloud-based software solution helps to manage any sort of data with functional scalability.
Interface and Experience
User interface (UI) and User experience (UX) in enterprise software are as important as it is in consumer applications. Enterprise software requires a more simplified interface to ease out the job. Every feature, functional buttons, navigation, and operational data should be in the vicinity of the user. Any perplexity will result in productivity at the end of the day.
Hence, enterprise application developers and designers should keep an eye on UI and UX. It can define the efficiency of applications and the productivity of employees in an enterprise.
Solution:
Embracing the requirements and user expectations right from the design part will help to eliminate this challenge. Analyzing and implementing the essential navigation signs and interactive design models also helps to frame out a satisfying application with superior user experience.
ROI and TAT:
The return of Investment entirely depends upon the productivity of the application. As the development cycle extends the expense involved would also go higher as well. Further, the expenses are not ending at anywhere. It continues to consume the enterprise budget for maintenance, security patchworks, and periodic modifications.
Therefore, it is essential to assure the application serves its best. It is required to assess the Key Performance Indicators with the expected business milestones at regular intervals. If the application couldn’t perform, enterprises should reconsider the support of applications. Hence, analyzing the shortcomings and the performance reports it should be revamped to gain the maximum ROI within the best TAT.
Application Maintenance
Application maintenance is a long-lasting obligation for enterprise application developers. It is not just checking the functionalities and efficiency but periodic monitoring, security updates, patching, etc. Moving the application into a new environment and adding advanced technology components would come under application maintenance.
Moreover, it shouldn’t take too much time to complete the process. Plus, it should not cause any operational interruption over the course as well. Thus, a strategic maintenance approach is quintessential to ensure seamless application maintenance.
Solution:
Application maintenance is an on-going process that needs an innovative strategy to resolve. Embracing modular architecture in the app design and development cycle helps to handle these daunting tasks far better. It further enables the engineers to carry out the process quite efficiently without much noise.
Conclusion:
Enterprise application development involves a sequence of processes that extends to several months. Each stage is crucial and requires high attention to detail. Plus, as the business requirement and innovative technologies disrupt the market the challenges spikes up. However, starting with an efficient and smart design plan will help to mitigate these haunting challenges in application development.
