This article will explore key challenges facing business and enterprise software development in 2022 and how they can be solved.
Before diving into enterprise application development challenges, it’s essential to define it clearly. An enterprise app is a large-scape application or system developed to work within corporate environments.
Enterprise appellations connect different business protocols like budget planning, human resources, and control management (and more) to a single system. Think of it as the force that powers business operations.
As they are highly customized, enterprise applications are complex and challenging to develop. They must consistently cater to different needs at the micro and macro level. However, it’s worth the effort as enterprise apps help streamline and simplify business processes, reduce costs, enhance collaboration and communication, and exert more control over corporate data.
Whenever you start an enterprise application development project, it’s critical to be sure about the problems you hope to solve with this application. However, even when this is the case, sometimes the changing demands of the marketplace can alter your business requirements.
When developing enterprise solutions, it’s important to first discuss your present and future needs with your software development partner. It’s also important to try and predict how your requirements may evolve to build an adaptable enterprise app.
Changing requirements can lead to costly mistakes and significant delays. This makes it essential to perceive every upgrade as a shift in your business requirements. So, make sure to develop apps that are flexible and capable of adapting to changes.
This makes it important to work with a team of seasoned developers who can see the bigger picture and code accordingly.
Keeping enterprise infrastructure secure is a huge challenge in the current threat landscape. Developers must find innovative ways to fortify enterprise software and secure confidential information like customer data, trade secrets, and internal business processes.
Enterprise systems must boast robust defense protocols like encryption, firewalls, and network security protocols. It’s necessary to build your application on a foundation of security. In this scenario, a DevSecOps approach is ideal.
While time to production is important, the need to identify and rectify potential vulnerabilities is paramount. Even after the enterprise app is deployed, regular security audits (including penetration tests) are needed to ensure security, privacy, and regulatory compliance.
Developers also face significant challenges when it comes to integrating application programming interfaces (APIs) and other complex third-party integrations. Integrating third-party solutions is the obvious choice when various stakeholders demand their application to cater to different processes and business needs. But it can also introduce complexity because most companies still use monolithic legacy systems.
When businesses still operate with colossal legacy architecture, everything from data inputs and outputs, error handling, data processes, and even user interfaces (UIs) are all interwoven. If you’re already heavily using the app, integration is increasingly complex because of the size and complexity of the application.
So, if you’re thinking about third-party integrations, you must inform your development partner now. In this scenario, it’s critical to discuss the scalability and scope of the app. This is because they need to test and write code to fully integrate new applications with legacy applications.
One of Europe’s leading retail companies once turned to us for help building an IoT dashboard to improve customer behavior tracking, patterns identification and insights generation.
Using CCTV cameras and video analytics servers, our business application development team built a high-tech solution based on the following architecture and tech stack:
Furthermore, we employed:
As a result of our custom-built CCTV analytics solution, the Client gained the following benefits:
Data storage is a common enterprise app development challenge. This is because enterprise applications generate massive amounts of data and demand large-scale data storage with fast access.
Storing and analyzing data is a challenge in itself; however, when you add oceans of unstructured data, it becomes even more challenging. Thus, enterprise apps need elaborate infrastructure with powerful servers and scalable workloads. All this comes at a cost, so exploring all the different variables is essential before starting your enterprise development project.
Application development cycles are often long and can be unpredictable if business requirements change midway. This makes it crucial for companies to plan and prepare for different scenarios to ensure business continuity. If you have a clear idea about your business requirements and don’t make any amendments, you will save both time and money.
Traditional enterprise applications didn’t concentrate too much on developing an intuitive, user-friendly UI. The good news is that it’s slowly changing to reflect the ethos of customer-facing applications.
When developing new enterprise software, it’s essential not to clutter the UI with a whole host of functions and features most users won’t be familiar with. As such, concentrate on the different functions, and features employees need to get the job done.
It’s also important to define the UX in the application. When the UX is seamless, and the UI is highly user-friendly, even non-techy business users will be able to get the most out of the application. Furthermore, it’ll help accelerate adoption within the organization.
Most businesses have several different departments with different expectations and requirements. If two or more separate business units use the enterprise app, clearly defining each department’s needs will be critical.
At its most basic, different teams must be able to communicate and collaborate seamlessly. However, it’s extremely difficult to formulate thorough descriptions of what they all want to get out of the application without going through the process multiple times. Even if just two different departments use the application, their competing demands may pose some unique challenges.
The key here is to work closely with your enterprise application development partner during the planning phase. All stakeholders must engage developers directly, break down silos, and help them formulate a clear understanding of what’s needed.
Once you overcome these challenges and your enterprise app is ready to go live, you will still have one final hurdle—staff training. Your employees will be the ones using the application, so it’s vital to train them and help them ease into a new way of working. It’s also essential to offer as many resources as possible to help them learn independently and troubleshoot potential issues on their own.
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