What are the Challenges of Enterprise Application Development?

Developing an enterprise application is a cumbersome task. Building such application requires great skills, vision and precision. There are many challenges that come your way and it is important that you have some idea about the same.

1. Changing Environments and Business Requirements

Sometimes, the environment of the business might change completely. The changes can be in the form of economic disruptions or technological changes. Based on the feedback and data analysis, the way the company works may change too. This means that new requirements have to be set and new workflows have to be implemented.

In some cases, there can be acquisition or merger taking place at organization level. At such situations, it is not easy to merge both the businesses into one and come up with an individual enterprise application which works for both.

Such applications are complex in nature and so when you attempt to make change in one requirement, it can have direct effect on another one. You can predict such changes quickly but by having a scalable and flexible architecture is very crucial.

Tip: When you make use of modular architecture then any changes made to a single module is not going to affect other modules and will not alter their functioning. This will save you a lot of development time that would be otherwise spent on making corrections.

2. Moving to Mobile Platform

Today more number of enterprise applications is planning to turn mobile. The demand of enterprise mobility is increasing every year. Compared to desktop solutions, mobility and cloud computing is moving ahead quickly and if your company does not offer such application services, it might lose its relevance. Mobility can help with faster decision-making and can boost productivity.

Customers as well as employees like mobility solutions and so it has turned to be more of a necessity today. Moving to mobile platform can be a quick decision to make but the challenge here is to make the transition as smooth as possible. You don’t want to have a heavy mobile application developed and also ensure all the important functionalities are included in there.

Tip: Creating right experience for the mobile users is very important. You need to check the layout properly to ensure that it fits in properly with the mobile format.

3. Security

Security is a very important point to consider when developing mobile applications and this means securing the resources and controlling user access. Enterprise application comes with a number of services like Business Process Services, Operating System Services, User-Interface Services, etc. and by controlling user access, you will be able to set authorized users for such services.

For any application having a strong defence system in place is important and this should be applied at network and host level, including firewalls and encryptions. For any company, enterprise data is very important. For the same, install right security software in your application and ensure your data is completely protected.

Your cloud-based software and mobile applications are more prone to cyber-attacks because of the increased vulnerabilities that come through different networks. You need to be sure that the security software you are using is capable enough to handle things. Necessary security patches should be updated regularly within the software and it should be implemented across all the platforms.

Tip: It is important to conduct application vulnerability test on regular basis and it should be assessed. Such tests will look for loopholes in the software where the hackers can attack the software. You need to be sure that everything is secure and under control.

4. Big Data

Today data is getting collected at a great speed. Large volumes of data are getting accumulated in enterprise applications and the main challenge they face is to manage the data efficiently. Again, large volumes of data means increased data centre costs, storage costs, network costs, etc. for the enterprises, and slow loading speed of the application for the users which compromises their experience.

It would be better that you make use of Hadoop like Big Data platforms to move your inactive data as they offer affordable storage, security and maintenance. You can always keep your active data on Tier-I infrastructure; however it is quite expensive compared to the former option.

Tip: You need to be sure about the kind of the big data application (cloud-based or on-premise), you will be choosing for your project.

5. Changing Technology

Change is inevitable. Enterprise applications have been changed by cloud computing models and traditional delivery models are replaced by Software as a Service(SaaS) today. The technology which is relevant today may turn to be obsolete tomorrow. When developing enterprise application, you need to be sure that it is future-proof and should not go through changes often.

Including technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be a great move as more number of businesses are identifying its potential and implementing it. Opting for a modular architecture will make it safe and quick to upgrade your application based on technology changes.

Tip: Stay close with the latest trends and technologies in the market. Get insights from them and build a strategy to be ahead in the game.