3 Critical Features of Must-Have Business Apps

Today's app environment has created certain expectations among users.

Applications are everywhere. This has generated a change in users' expectations. The more highly functional apps they encounter, the more discerning they become. Developing powerful applications has never been easy, but it is now more difficult than ever.

The finished products must emerge from the development and testing cycle quickly, while the need that sparked the project is still being felt acutely. They must also take on numerous other attributes to ensure the intended audience does not pass them over. Developers equipped with the right utilities, such as dedicated Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) deployments, may be able to achieve this combination of features.

Ensure high availability

App users today don't want to deal with downtime. Ensuring software is stable and reliable before deploying it is a must. Working with the cloud instead of on-premise technology has become an application development touchstone, as harnessing hosted architecture can create a strong framework that supports an ever-increasing amount of users. Even a server failure can't stop apps based in cloud architecture, as they are hosted across a number of physical hardware locations. Working with PaaS tools that support deploying apps on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model can grant this type of resilience and steady performance.

Build in data access

The right software development setup may also help teams create apps that are deeply connected to company information. This data is absolutely vital for decision-making purposes, and ensuring that end-users always have access to it could streamline their everyday operations. Leading PaaS solutions include connectivity components to establish links with many different storage locations at once. These act as intermediaries between the software and the data, ensuring that there is no need to change the code to reflect API updates. The more information sources introduced to a company's environment, the more powerful this capability becomes for users.

Create apps that can change

Dealing with a wide variety of situations is a basic business skill, and employees expect their applications to share this ability. One way to ensure software can shift to suit the situation is to employ business rule management. If developers can include these adaptable components in apps, they enable users to shift their operations on the fly without digging around in the code. This degree of malleability proves its value in time saved. Agility is a prized quality in apps today. Delivering this capability, along with access to information and the powerful availability of the cloud, can mark a successful developer.