Unified rapid enterprise application delivery architecture
Unified rapid enterprise application delivery architecture is promoted and explained as the best means to align business outcomes with IT development.
Gone are the days of stand-alone goliath applications. Modern organizations recognize that enterprise application development needs to be more agile, flexible and faster. The drive to be continuously innovative needs to correspond with scaling business needs. With apps becoming increasingly essential for an enterprise growth, the associated demand from end-users has also scaled.
Laying the foundational architecture for rapid enterprise application delivery
This is where the need for low-code development platforms or rapid application development platforms truly become indispensable. The key to its success is in rethinking our approach to rapid enterprise application delivery architecture.
Envision the Architecture
In a survey of IT directors from over 2500 brands in 93 nations, Gartner’s 2016 “CIO Agenda” estimated a total of USD 292 billion in spending on enterprise software. By 2017, the actual figures had crossed USD 354 billion, an 8.5 percent year over year increase, with an estimated rise of 9.4 percent expected over the 2018 period.
However, as digital transformation becomes a persistent part of growth, risks of inefficiency and slow speed become even more critical to survival. Organizations need to assess their applications development process to determine how they can reform their application delivery architecture.
Over the last five years, RAD platforms have proved themselves to be a mature alternative to traditional application solutions. The versatility and ease of developing web and mobile applications through rapid application development are intrinsically rooted in the needs of modern enterprises. Enterprise developers need to rethink the nature of their applications delivery architecture and seek out RAD optimized standards.
As digital technologies emerge and demands for adaptable systems rises, the underlying architecture requires the considerations of factors such as legacy core systems, established infrastructure, and active processes. Cutting-edge app delivery architecture is built on a number of choices that impact the overall outcome of the final process and can be approached across four main categories.
Syncing RAD with business processes
A typical enterprise IT environment inform that about 80% of its professionals devote half their time to fixing and reworking solutions. With mobile and web companies moving towards systems convergence, the need for cross-platform migration and user experience is also becoming more demanding on development teams. Effective applications delivery architecture, therefore, needs to be aligned with current and future-oriented business needs of an enterprise.
Internal enterprise IT needs shorter software lifecycles that can flow more harmoniously with business operations.
This ever-increasing gap between enterprise business needs and IT’s evolution can be effectively bridged through a rapid app development delivery architecture. For example, with the HokuApps RAD platform, developers can fabricate customized workflows that empower various lines of business with ease. The low-code based systems architecture not only improves the rapid integration of apps and systems, it also allows users to unleash agile solutions in an intelligent and synchronous manner with existing workflow needs.This allows the practical convergence of IT development and business development across a single platform.
Such close alignment between business processes and IT development also allows for iterative improvements in the process which is informed by the domain knowledge of the user base. By organizing the many components of full-stack applications across an optimized architecture the productivity and speed of deployment can be radically improved. Such dramatic outcomes can only be possible if the RAD system development is empowered at the architectural level to leverage quick feedback from end users.
UI and Design Integration
UI and Design Integration
The well-established importance of an appealing user interface is also essential. Unfortunately, we often find that the imbalance between design and function results in undesirable consequences for end-users. RAD system development can contribute to a positive UX/UI, by making it easier for developers to quickly improve UI through the iterative approach. Such a platform also connects users and developers to seamlessly bridge the gaps of experience throughout the development process.
As mobile-based interfaces become standardized in user experience, the corresponding advancements of client-side technology are also factored in easily at the underlying architectural level. As new tools such as JavaScript, frameworks, devices and browsers transition to more standardized models, the focus on the enterprise app delivery architecture should be more technology agnostic. In such a way an app developer can improve the end-user experience through the use modular components. Such a unified approach in the underlying architecture of a RAD platform will result in fast and responsive apps.
A Unified Deployment Platform
Enterprises have learned that they need to closely align their business process management systems with their applications delivery systems. In such an integration-driven environment, rapid app development requires a homogeneous architecture across operational divisions. This standardization allows for simplifying the complex application architecture across the company and easing deployment pain-points between users and developers. A unified platform reduces the burden on a company’s IT department by optimizing their area of operation.
Enterprise app developers also gain greater flexibility with their human resources, making the continuity of tasks possible across smaller groups.
Such a unified architecture for rapid app development moves further beyond the low-code requirement, to a potentially zero code environment. Agile IT development teams can then configure modules and components to instantly deploy applications across the platform in sync with business needs.
Data Versatility and Scalability
App development architecture also needs to provide for the diversity of data that an enterprise may require beyond the present. As companies become more data-centric, the existing architecture needs to enable linkages between applications and versatile data sets. The wide distribution and versatility of any data in a business environment need easy integration provisions to enable systems evolution. Enterprise applications need to manage sophisticated data manipulation and organization tasks as they scale-up over time and the underlying development architecture needs to provide for such scalability. Developers should be able to rely on the systems architecture to allow them easy integration of data to applications.
Data Versatility and Scalability
As enterprises continue to embrace digital transformation they have to seek out platforms that are built on a reliable, scalable and adaptable delivery architecture that provides fulfillment irrespective of what the future might hold.
