Before we move to the discussion on the barriers to enterprise application development, we rather go with explaining what exactly enterprise application development is and why it is the talks of the time today.
Enterprise Application Development
To explain it in the easiest language possible, an enterprise application is a software platform that is developed to be operated in any business environment. It is an agile and collaborative platform where applications are built using both internal resources and external factors. It has a job to function smoothly, cater to the requirement of a company, integrate multiple systems of the company, stay secure and share a significant return on investment (ROI).
Despite being the support that is needed by the organization, enterprise application development is quite complex. These are complex systems that require systematic planning for the right time of development. Lack of knowledge while developing enterprise applications can be costly and hardening.
Let's move to barriers that are usually faced by developers during enterprise application development.
1. Cost
As already mentioned above, cost is a major factor in enterprise application development. It's obvious that it incurs huge costing into the development. The major challenge here is to justify the development cost with the ROI. Various cost aspects in the development of enterprise applications could be:
2. Security
For any enterprise apps, it's important to control the user's access and secure the resources of application to ensure security. However, this still remains a major concern among enterprises that are planning to go mobile in near future.
More and more emphasis is on BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) in the organization which apparently brings the security threat of the company's data and information. Thus, security is one major barrier in enterprise application development.
Recent security breaches stress the need upon creating a more robust application architecture, no matter for what platform you are creating the application for. Along with this, businesses to need to set the guidelines for usage of application and restricting authorization. Besides, your technology partner, may be a web application development company should also make sure to take necessary measures related to authentication and authorization.
3. Dynamic Business Environments
There’s no surprise in knowing that the market we serve for is dynamic and volatile in nature. The trend today may be outdated tomorrow. Nonetheless, changing business environments makes enterprise application development complicated.
This is due to the fact that enterprise applications are critical to develop and require full-fledged planning before going into development. Any change in one requirement may make an impact on other requirements directly or indirectly. However, this issue could be sorted by having a flexible and scalable architecture.
4. Lack of Resources
Enterprise applications have recently hit the market and have been in demand ever since. Despite the factors that it is difficult to develop, security is a big concern and costly, it has ROI that covers everything and bring benefits to enterprises. However, being a new arena in the market, it still lacks resources.
There is a shortage of right skills and you need to find the expertise in the field in order to get an application developed. It is necessary to find skilled resources that will take care of cyber security along with networking. For mobility solution, it is required to integrate networks and personnel which ensures seamless working.
Businesses have to understand that no technology is constant. To catch up with the pace of technology, they will need to work in collaborative environment. For example, platforms such as Android or iOS are constantly updating their technology to provide better solution to the users. In line, an iOS or Android app development company also work to upgrade the skills of their resources.
5. Data Access
With the concept of BYOD, enterprise application welcomes another major challenge. This is related to allowing employees to access data from wherever they are. Data is the need for employees who are traveling to clients place or working from another location.
Therefore, the employee-specific enterprise application needs to be equipped with storage capacity to retain the data and updated it whenever an employee comes online. Other than this, backup of data is also a major concern so that employees do not miss any important information needed to deal with clients at any point in time.
6. Emerging Technologies
There is a wave of trends in the market that has elevated the joy of user experience. Trends like Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things are to name a few. Enterprise applications being one of the newest buzzes is expected to be aligned with the emerging technologies.
However, this seems to be a bit of a challenge since integration with new technologies would only require a huge amount of budget, skilled resources, planned strategy, and development plan. The challenge currently for the enterprise mobile app development is to have scalable apps to test and try the emerging technologies that bring profit in the enterprises.
7. Moving Towards Mobile Applications
Most of the businesses are planning to go mobile due to the power of reachability of mobile devices. This goes in the case of businesses with enterprise applications as well. It is estimated that by the end of 2018, the global market for enterprise mobility is projected to reach US$218 billion. With Java language, developers are now more comfortable in developing mobile apps.
The barrier here is to make the transition from application to mobile easy and simple by including the essential, basic functions on the mobile platform. This requires a lot of testing to get the layouts and fields right on the mobile apps.
8. Maintenance
Simply by having an enterprise application is not the end of development. Any application is it on web or mobile needs continuous maintenance to keep the application running properly without any error. Maintenance is one such barrier that is common in almost all kinds of developments.
In the case of enterprise applications too, maintenance needs to be done periodically to clear any bugs, errors from the application and add new features and functionalities to keep the application updated with recent times.
9. Big Data
There is a constant increase in the quantity of data in businesses. Even while you are reading this, there are data increasing at a high rate. Digital transformation has paved the way for enterprises to move one step ahead and get involved in managing big data. It is so because this is going to support the enterprises in the future as well.
However, the challenge here is to investigate the maintenance of big data. Data cannot be tampered since it will ruin any future prospects of the business. Thus, enterprise mobile development companies are needed to plan the app environment such that they can manage big data efficiently and secure the future betterment of the enterprises.
Conclusion
Summing up, there is lot to talk about enterprise application development. It’s one such area that is changing the dynamics of the industry. With growing popularity of mobile applications, enterprise applications are inclined towards mobility as well. The expectations are high but challenges too are high. If planned properly, enterprise application development is smooth and profitable at the same time.
