FINAL WORD
Not surprisingly, back-end integration
was ranked near the top of the list of
enterprise mobility challenges in a
recent survey of Red Hat’s enterprise
customers, conducted by TechValidate
on behalf of Red Hat, second only to
security. When asked about hiring
priorities, 27% of respondents who are
on the lookout for mobile development
resource reported that they were
planning to hire people with back-end
integration skills.
The survey also found that 55%
of enterprises are currently using
a combination of external sources
(libraries, marketplace, and vendor
services) and coding from scratch to
integrate mobile apps with their backend systems. In spite of the challenges,
the demand for mobile applications
is growing. However, businesses will
struggle to scale and sustain the
development of multiple apps if each
app requires custom integration to backend systems.
Notably, the past few years have seen
enterprises adopting mobile back-end
as a service (MBaaS), which acts as
a cloud-based and on-premise hub
between mobile apps and the backend systems that they need to access.
TechValidate found that a third of the
enterprises it surveyed had adopted
mobile application platforms (MBaaS)
to assist them in overcoming the
challenges of back-end integration.
MAD for Mobile
The requirement to securely and
efficiently integrate core systems of
record with an increasing number of
mobile apps and to do so at speed
is driving changes to both enterprise
application architecture and modes of
development. Mobile-first organisations
have adopted three key approaches
to meeting mobile application
development challenges head on:
Microservices, agile development and
DevOps.
Microservices
Many attempts have been made to
address the issues associated with
monolithic applications using new
80
INTELLIGENTCIO
CATHAL MCGLOIN
Vice President, Mobile
Platforms, Red Hat
A MICROSERVICES APPROACH HAS THE ADVANTAGE
OF ALLOWING APP COMPONENTS TO BE RAPIDLY
DEVELOPED, DEPLOYED, UPDATED, AND RETIRED, TO
SUIT THE NEEDS OF CUSTOMERS AND EMPLOYEES.
approaches. Most recently the idea of
“microservices” has come to the fore,
particularly in the context of enterprise
mobile development.
In a microservices architecture,
complex applications are
decomposed into small, modular,
decoupled, independent processes.
These fine-grained services each
perform a single function and all
communicate using languageagnostic APIs.
In the context of using an MBaaS to
mobilise existing enterprise systems, a
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