Top Challenges of Enterprise Application Development and How to Solve Them

6 minutes read

Enterprises are spending on IT infrastructure far and wide. They aim to eliminate redundancies, ensure operational efficiency, and gain a competitive edge. Today, it’s almost impossible to address these issues without a custom enterprise application.

Large development solutions capable of tracking and controlling all of the company’s complicated activities require careful planning, coordination, and execution. And no business can afford to compromise on quality.

To make this process a bit easier, we wrote this blog that discusses what are the challenges of enterprise systems and how businesses can overcome them.

6 Challenges of Enterprise Application Development

Building an enterprise application is a complex task that requires businesses to fully understand their objectives while meeting the expectations of stakeholders. Here are the most common pitfalls that organizations face when developing enterprise apps:

#1 Frequent Changes in Business Requirements

Enterprise application systems need to be adaptable as the enterprise environment evolves fast. Therefore there is always a temptation to constantly adjust the requirements to the needs of different stakeholders and departments.

As a result, frequent changes in requirements are one of the most common enterprise application development challenges.

They harm deadlines, budget, and motivation of the development team as their progress is constantly set back.

Solution

The fundamental of successful cooperation is setting clear requirements beforehand. Start with interviewing stakeholders individually to highlight similarities and contradictions, and let them discuss the issues together to agree upon a final requirement document.

Emphasis on planning and feedback before the project kicks off.

We recommend embracing agile software development practices to iteratively build and refine your app. It allows breaking down the development process into smaller, manageable tasks, and prioritizing features based on user feedback and business value.

#2 Challenges in Integrating Third-Party Systems

Another of the main enterprise application challenges is integrating third-party systems.

Unlike regular software that may not require extensive integration with other systems or applications, enterprise ecosystems involve combining various technologies, services, and functionalities.

Usually, companies face many challenges of enterprise application integration that can result in security concerns, inefficiency, and time and money losses.

The first issue lies in ensuring that third-party software is compatible with your existing systems and tools. Compatibility issues not only impact the stability and functionality of the integrated systems by leading to errors, bugs, or performance degradation but can also compromise the overall user experience.

Third-party software may also have vulnerabilities and malware, therefore it’s important to verify the reliability of a software vendor and scan it for malicious code. Security should be a top priority when dealing with sensitive data.

Corporate applications require a good level of customization which may require modifying the code, configuration, or interface.

Solution

Successfully integrating third-party systems in enterprise app development involves careful planning and coordination. Here are some steps to ensure successful integration:

#3 Scalability and Performance

Business expectations and user traffic volumes tend to expand over time, so enterprise systems must be built in a way that allows to accommodate these changes. Scalable solutions allow enterprise systems to absorb increased workloads and user concurrency not compromising overall performance. Performance optimization plays a key role in ensuring smooth and efficient operations.

Solution

In order to ensure advanced scalability and performance of an enterprise application you need to approach planning of application architecture carefully by choosing optimal tech stack, implementing distributed systems, horizontal scaling techniques along load balancing mechanisms.

You might also want to fine-tune your database queries, optimise algorithms, or implement caching mechanisms to decrease response times which has a positive and significant impact on overall app performance.

#4 Data Storage and Processing

As the business grows, data will also grow at an unprecedented rate. Some businesses go from terabytes to petabytes in days. More and more businesses face the challenge of managing and optimizing the data on a regular basis so as to receive meaningful benefits.

Data that is large in scale requires complex infrastructure to store and process it, forcing businesses to invest in high-tech services that must be flexible to cater to the needs of the enterprise.

Solution

Considering the app development, cloud-based software seems to be a perfect fit for this purpose. Businesses have a range of options to choose from depending on their particular needs.

Those can be data area network (SAN), network-attached storage (NAS), or direct-attached storage (DAS). Another great option for businesses that don’t want to go deep with the above options is to use AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud where you can pay as you use.

#5 Application Security

Security breaches always have serious consequences - legal, reputational, and financial.

In 2015, as a result of a sophisticated cyberattack, Anthem, one of the largest health insurance companies in the US, fell victim to a data breach compromising the personal information of nearly 78.8 million individuals.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of examples as such. Hence, maintaining the utmost security standards is one of the most significant enterprise application challenges. Remember, a vulnerability within one app can lead to the security failure of the entire corporate network.

Solution

The security policies, procedures, and technical safeguards must be on a high level.

Every country differs in terms of laws and regulations, especially when it comes to ownership, trademarks, and patents. That’s why it’s important to educate yourself about the procedures of legal protection.

Implement secure development lifecycle management, and extensive testing, and ensure regular updates.

Conducting periodic software audits and educating your employees and end users about possible risks is a critical component of building strong security levels of your software.

best security practices for enterprise app development

#6 Finding the Right Partner

Though there are a lot of fish in the sea, it might be still challenging to find the right expertise for your project, especially if you want to extend your in-house team by hiring external professionals.

Making the wrong choice of a vendor can lead to delays, cost overruns, and poor quality of work.

Solution

First of all, don’t be tempted to choose the cheapest option. Carefully evaluate the vendor’s expertise, study the portfolio, check customers’ reviews on independent platforms such as Clutch, and GoodFirms, and arrange a call with your potential candidates. Feel free to request the CVs of team members who are going to work on your project.

Outsourcing providers offer different cooperation models. Therefore, it’s important to outline a clear project roadmap and define the scope of the project, its objectives, deliverables, budget, etc, so that you can choose the best option for your business processes.

How to Solve Common Challenges in Enterprise Application Development

Executing these steps will help you overcome possible challenges of enterprise application development you may face.

inVerita - Reliable Partner in Enterprise Application Development

At first sight, all the enterprise application development challenges listed above may seem difficult to tackle. However, if you have a clear understanding of the end product, an understanding of the software development process, and a reliable vendor at your side, there won’t be substantial enterprise application development challenges.

inVerita is a software development company that serves both startups and Fortune 500 companies. With expertise in enterprise software development for healthcare, fintech, logistics, and retail domains, we can help you create a high-quality solution in a timely manner.

Just drop us a line and we will set up a free consultation to discuss your project requirements and ways of their realizations.

Frequently Asked Questions

What overarching challenges do organizations typically encounter during the lifecycle of enterprise application development?

The most common challenges of enterprise application development include making frequent changes to business requirements, finding a reliable software vendor, managing smooth integration of legacy systems, ensuring good business application scalability and performance, and data storage and processing.

What general strategies can organizations adopt to enhance the scalability of their applications to meet evolving business demands?

Scalability is one of the main enterprise application development challenges. To improve scalability, organizations can leverage cloud services for flexible resource allocation, implement load balancing to distribute traffic evenly, optimize performance to reduce latency, decouple components for independent scaling, and continuously monitor an,d auto-scaling based on workload patterns.

How is enterprise application development different from regular software development?

Unlike regular software, custom business applications are large-scale solutions that cater to the complex needs of the entire organization and handle a higher volume of users, transactions, and data. They require a high degree of customization and involve integrating with various existing systems, databases, and third-party applications within the enterprise ecosystem.

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