As the sale of mobile devices keep on increasing every year, mobile cloud architecture’s becoming more important for businesses. CIOs need to develop new strategies which focus on the importance and impact of cloud and mobile technologies.
By joining the clouds utility with the number of mobile devices being used right now, CIOs have a large number of income opportunities which can be made profitable through the synergetic relationship of mobile devices and the cloud.
Mobile obviously requires support from iOS and Android. Users prefer native apps. This means developing a couple of code bases.
That’s quite the challenge. This means prioritizing features in apps and not succumbing to big-bang releases where you try loading a lot of data into a single release. Instead, improvements and features are required to be added incrementally over time. There’s a shortage of talent too. Hiring experienced developers is expensive and difficult. Retraining existing developers requires money and time.
The cloud eases the challenges of mobile application development
How does this get us to the cloud? There’s a link and it is related to how mobile apps are constructed. As a deployment platform, it’s obvious that the cloud is very popular because of its convenience, speed, and the number of services cloud providers offer.
One clear advantage is the lack of capital expenditures upfront. Cloud reduces operation expenses by outsourcing most day-to-day operations to service providers. This lets IT move from an operational based focus to innovation based focus.
There will always be a job for operations and IT, but with the cloud, the balance is tipped in favor of innovation. The cloud supports the idea of agile development which is pivotal when it comes to mobile clients since most services are auto-updating themselves and managed by service providers.
The cloud does make it easier to deploy updated versions, to have parallel releases, makes it easy to introduce new machines, test new versions, have different versions running together, etc. It is scalable, which makes it very important when talking about mobile devices.
When it comes to mobile services, growth spikes can be unpredictable and extreme. The cloud lets organizations start small and then grow as and when needed. They can also scale up or down through the year depending on usage.
App design patterns
This is the main reason why the cloud appeals so much to mobile clients. Mobile clients typically try adopting bifurcated functionality where clients piece together total application packages focusing on user engagement, user interface, information display, and capture. It’s used as sort of a conduit for back-end services which handle data access, business logic, storage, security, user state, etc.
If you think about this, it isn’t very different from how multi-tier web apps are created where browsers have limited functionality with most heavy lifting happening at the database and middleware layers on the back end. The biggest difference here is that you will actually have split functionality between handheld devices and the back-end service. This is something that IT is not typically going to be involved in.
