Enterprise Strategy - Mobility Architecture

To continue our series on enterprise mobility strategy, this chapter explores the key areas to consider when selecting solutions and vendors for your enterprise mobile architecture.

First of all, let’s start with some basic information. At a high level, a typical enterprise mobility architecture is 3-tiered. It includes:

• Enterprise Systems Tier: Encompasses the data sources (ERP, CRM, CMS), the web services, the Identity Management Systems of your enterprise.
• Middle Tier: This middleware provides data abstraction from various sources, data normalization for client consumption, data masking and filtering for security purposes and finally, client or project scenario specific business logic.
• Client Tier: This is also referred as the presentation layer. It provides an app interface for the user to interact with.

Additional solutions can be added to complement and improve your enterprise architecture. For instance, an MDM/MAM will help with device and app management or a monitoring solution can help analyze and generate reports on your overall architecture.

When architecting your mobile infrastructure and selecting solutions and vendors, these are the key areas that you should consider:

1. Own your Requirements: Understand your short-term and long-term needs, who are your users and your business processes, what types of mobile and non-mobile applications your enterprise will need, what are the security requirements as well as the IT policies. Then choose an architecture, which will support all your current requirements and be flexible enough to fulfill your future mobile needs.
2. Don’t Compromise on Security: Make sure to select the appropriate architectural components, which support your IT security policies and allow adding future security layers as needed. This is especially critical for cloud hosted mobile solution, as you never want to have to compromise with security, cloud-based architecture or not.
3. Keep your Mobile Architecture Flexible: A loosely coupled architecture provides a more flexible solution to the enterprise, vertically and horizontally. For instance, each of the tiers mentioned above should be loosely coupled allowing you to easily replace any of those layers. Similarly, components in each of these tiers should also be loosely coupled with each other for ease of maintenance.
4. Make it Scalable and Open: One of the two other key considerations is to make sure your solution is scalable to multi-platforms and multiple channels to adapt to a rapidly evolving environment. And the second key considerations is to ensure that your architecture supports best-of-breed options allowing you to select and easily integrate 3rd party tools such as analytics and app management solutions.
5. Don’t get locked in! It is critical that you build your architecture and select solutions that will never lock you in. As technologies advance, you want to be able to replace the underlying components separately without being required to replace your entire infrastructure.

Leveraging an enterprise MBaaS (mobile backend as a service) can help achieve these goals. But remember, not all MBaaS vendors are created equal!

Learn more about how to build a modern architecture for rapid app development by watching our latest webinar with 451 Research.