Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) the Future of Enterprise Architecture

Mobile App Development

In the world of the cloud computing technologies, the MBaaS has created a buzz. Do you know why it is? It is quite different from others like PaaS, IaaS, etc. Let us introduce you that what MBaaS is all about first, so you get the whole idea and think over it to jump onto the bandwagon, if not today, may it be tomorrow. By nature, MBaaS is a backend service, which is connecting the web and mobile apps to the 3rd party Cloud services in a simple way.

• It lets you add common functions such as user management, cloud data, push notifications, and file storage through decent frontend/backend services.
• These services are available through SDKs and APIs relevant to cloud computing development.
• It has an array of tools to do nice things for the programmers, and the most lucrative matter is that it is ‘Rentable’ so it is gaining momentum gradually.

Before showering words of praise that how MBaaS can add values in modern mobile landscapes and businesses as a whole, let us tell you that why we need it now?

Why We Need MBaaS

We know the history of computing devices and their evaluation as well. Our journey begins with big computers covering the entire room and gradually it has shrunken to fit on a desktop, then in the palm of users, and now on the wrist, eyes, or the body of users. Yes, after handheld devices like smartphones and tablets, wearables will rule the software industry. Of course, wearables are in its infantile stage and the incubation period may be long. Meanwhile, we have to focus on the mobiles/handhelds and prepare to shift on wearable tomorrow. The uninterrupted journey of computing devices and their changed device-forms have posed unprecedented challenges for the web and mobile developer community. Let’s take a bird eyes views of those challenges.

#1: Challenges in the Application Development

There are numerous challenges in the app development, but the main are:

Demand for the Shortest App Development Cycle

Addressing the raising expectations of end-users from the app within the shortest app development period is tough to manage. The introduction of newer technologies with the pace of time is adding more intricacies and scale the project on the big.

Complexities in the Project Cost Estimation

Web app and web services are different from the mobile apps for the developers. Similarly, iOS is quite different from the Android and so forth. Thus, offering native mobile experiences through cross-platform frameworks and development is remain obscure. Enterprise multichannel app development costing using the outdated reference infrastructure may lead to either underestimation or overestimation.

Budget as a Constrain

On enterprise IT landscape, the devices are increasing with a variety of form factors and capacities. With each new release of hardware or OS version, brings new complexities through requirements and limitations for the developer and their infrastructure. At one hand, the complexities are raising across both server-side and client-side development areas to address security and scalability issues. At another hand, budgets and software development resources are limited.

#2: Challenges in the Web Architecture

Certain challenges exist in the traditional web architecture such as:

Inability to Address Target Users’ Needs

Enterprises or businesses have focused on the specific line of business strategies and functionality needs in the application. None of the businesses is capable of addressing the overall needs of their target audience by taking holistic app development approaches.

Data Oriented Approaches

App design planning is mostly based on the prevailing data structure instead of in-depth analysis of actual requirements of the end-users or the prediction based on such surveys and analytics.

Unable to Change Management

If you want to implement large and cross-functional efforts in order to uncover and implement the actual needs of users, changing the management is tough.

#3: Challenges on the Device Front

Device form factors are varying so hardware and software capabilities. These all put strains on the app developers and they have to face some tough challenges like:

Addressing BYOD Phenomena

Enterprises and big businesses are now allowing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) concept for the computing or handheld devices. Therefore, developers have to face non-uniformities in device shapes, CPU power, battery power, OS, features, functionality, and use cases.

Users Are In Charge

As we know in BYOD concept, users are bringing their own devices to the premises or the duty of enterprise or business. Similarly, the users decide that which device should they use and when as well as where. Thus, predicting use cases, types of devices, locations, and so forth thing while planning the app development is tough to assume and include in prototyping.

Contexts

Modern users have tasted the cloying fruits of personalization and contextualization against simple customization on the modern mobile and web applications. Therefore, their expectations in this regard are great and addressing all in development is an inevitable challenge.

Security

Enterprises have intranet as well as the Internet. Various modes of accessing outside world information such as mobile connectivity, Wi-Fi, and Cloud services are existing. These all do one thing beautifully, and it is producing low hanging fruits for the hackers and other malicious elements existing near and far away at remote places to threaten the overall security aspects. Mobile app developers have to check all such security aspects under the umbrella of the security technologies available.

#4: Challenges in the Enterprise Digital Architecture

Traditional enterprise digital architecture is crumbling due to changing digital landscape. Therefore, app developers have to address various key components of digital enterprise architecture. For instance,

Offering Contextual Engagement

As stated earlier, modern enterprises’ users have different use cases, locations, and context to consume the content on the same app. Thus, delivering it is a digital architectural challenge.

UI Optimization

User interfaces for the iPhone/ Android Application need individual optimization for each channel of devices and expect the best user experiences in it.

Consistent User Profile Improvement

Capturing the digital footprint on each step of engagement with an application on such vast and diverse digital landscape is tough to manage at an architectural level in order to keep consistency in the improvements for user profiles.

Futuristic Capability

Modern application services and infrastructure have capabilities to catch the user preferences, user behaviors, and user feedback in real-time for long memories. Therefore, developers have to build applications that can anticipate the future requirements of such stored data for faster responses and excellent user experiences through better services.

Intricacies in Enterprise Digital Architecture

If we look at the key capabilities of the digital enterprise architecture, we can realize that how complicated to address such diverse nature of all services and demands with a single or multiple application developments. Check the table below to understand the complexities of architecture.

Identify Services	App Services	Engagement Services
OAuth support SSO/Federated Authentication LDAP services Active Directory	Enterprise App connectors Cloud integration in backend Social media integration User management services Email integration services	Notification services Location Usage analytics Collaboration Beacon services
Development Services	Data Services:	Security Services
Application programming Deployment environment APIs Client SDK Hosting environment Cloud support Local support	Data optimization Data orchestration Data mash-ups CMS Data connectors synchronization	Authentication services Encryption of data & OTA Decryption of data & OTA

MBaaS (Mobile Backend as a Service) the Perfect Solution

After looking at the table and the heaps of services listed, anyone in software development field can assume that how tough to incorporate each into a single app, as each service has its API.

At tech point of view, we need a unified API and SDK that can bridge the front end of an application and different cloud-based backend so developers need not to switch in between or says among them.

Thus, developers save themselves from the redevelopment of the backend for each service and manage backend data with a single cloud-based API and SDK.

Components of MBaaS

Based on the definition of MBaaS, we hardly assume that exactly how many components are involved in MBaaS platform, as it changes contextually and according to needs from the businesses. However, the anatomy of the mobile application in an ideal MBaaS environment would have two layers:

1. Thin Mobile Client: it is built with a light architecture based on MVC consisting of UX, tied with associated services, and controller logic.

2. MBaaS Platform: it is consisting of essential modules to connect with enterprise app data and have following common components.

Cloud-based Server Application Development:

Generally, Node.js based app is enough to offer a single scalable interaction point for managing client requests to the backend for micro services.

Due to its location on the cloud, it acts as the central hub for managing data across the multiple client-end applications, which are requesting services through multiple channels and regions.

Micro Services or Adaptors:

These components serve each mobile function request and respond with granular enterprise service data:

• Here user info, contexts, and locations are stored for future usage
• Various touch points are integrated and configured in order to accomplish app assembly once the layers of services are built
• Layer approach enables micro services to function as plug-in that can serve multiple apps according to the functional needs
• Mobile Data Objects:

The term data objects derived from the typical desktop computing paradigm. In that typical flow, the data in the databases are converting into the data objects in the middle tier and again converting into the different UI classes for the display.

MBaaS platform eliminates two-stage conversion process and simply turn mobile info into data objects from the micro services to mobile devices.

For the management of non-volatile client data, MBaaS provides a cache facility. It is with refresh limits and capable of meeting the client-side requests straight from the business/enterprise data layers.

Thus, it ensures high performance in MBaaS.

How MBaaS Addresses Challenges and Offer the Best Solutions

With aforementioned technical details and understanding regarding MBaaS, we will proceed to check how MBaaS addresses challenges as mentioned earlier and comes up with the sumptuous yet functional solutions.

Accelerate the Application Development Process

App developers have to spend the more than half of their time in building the user interfaces and their corresponding processes running behind. For instance, in the backend,

• App developers have to build and integrate various backend services.
• Expose the existing APIs
• Create an abstraction layer on the top of the APIs On the frontend,
• App developers have to handle the data caching
• Manage the object creation processes
• Manage the data parsing

Conclusively, we can say that these all tasks time and efforts consuming. Now in MBaaS, a unified API and SDK exist to bridge the frontend and backend processes, shrink the time and processes dramatically, and reduce all.

Moreover, during the further iteration and maintenance phases of development, it facilitates the app management and updates in order to reduce the TCO for each application.

Provides Consistent UX across the Devices and Applications

Generally, MBaaS offers a clean set of high-end web services due to its cloud nature.

An MBaaS layer enables your business to develop the app specific logics so you can cut tradeoffs across the different backend systems. As the result,

• Data protection would better
• Highly secure apps
• Highly relevant apps to the users
• The frontend interface is customized for specific endpoint format

In sum, you can offer positive and consistent user experiences to the end users.

Top Data Security

With MBaaS, the data is highly secured because the role of IT is restricting up to service providers and MBaaS enabling another line of business to build the apps. The MBaaS framework enables IT to standardize the entire access granting process in the backend and adds values to the development process through offering unified API and SDK for the business developers.

Thus, each group of business is free to develop their custom apps without worrying the security aspects and efficiencies.

MBaaS Platform in a Nutshell

Mobile App Types
Native Apps			Web Apps		Progressive Web Apps
OmniAuth Capability Mobile Business Logic Push notifications Email notifications			Mobile Support Services Service analytics Mobile Security		Data transforms CRUD operations Mobile Analytics

MBaaS Capabilities

#1: Mobile Security

Due to untrusted nature of mobiles, storing enterprise tokens for session management is dangerous. Therefore, MBaaS generate token for each user and have a separate token management mechanism.

#2: Mobile Business Logic

As usual, enterprise offers three-tier architecture to develop solutions and they are engagement, business, and service tiers. In the mobile app development, the business tier is seated in the device, and this poses many problems with changes business logic. On the MBaaS, the business logic is in the MBaaS layer, as it is common across the mobile devices.

#3: Mobile Analytics

MBaaS enables you to obtain analytics through two channels:

• The client interactions:

  • Fine tune the app for best UX

  • Feedback for number of page views

• The service analysis:

  • Insights of user devices and locations

  • Performance of the service

There are plug-ins to integrate 3^rd party analytics.

#4: Mobile Support Services

Integrated enterprise communication channels offer additional interactions with users through push notifications, the trigger for actions, and cross-channel connects.

• Due to mobile first approaches of businesses, MBaaS is becoming the choice of mobile integration platform to deliver the customer-centric omnichannel experiences.
• MBaaS is seemingly fit into the contemporary cloud technology development like CDN and ACE.
• MBaaS offers value added services offers opportunities for the improvements.

If you are interested in MBaaS app development company for your enterprise mobility solutions and integrated digital services, Addon Solutions has exceptional MBaaS capabilities and team to offer good ROI.

If you think something is missing here to get clues regarding the MBaaS and its futuristic capabilities, feel free to add it in the comment box.

Thanks.