Improve User Productivity by Utilizing Cloud Services to Better Serve Mobile Employees

Book Cover

#Mobile employees working around the world are best served by globally distributed #cloud services + replicated #data with low #network latency.

Your organization may have customers and employees distributed all over the world. These people have neither the time nor the patience to wait for data to travel great distances over land or though undersea cables. If your business is currently serving your constituents via an on-premises network or a regional data center, you’re not being responsive to their needs.

Take advantage of services provided by top-tier cloud providers with data centers distributed throughout the world. Narrow your list based on analyst and other trusted reviews of Platform as a Service (PaaS/Cloud development) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS/Virtualization) capabilities. Further narrow the list based on network capacity, redundancy, disaster recovery, data handling, support your existing server operating systems, databases, programming languages, and connectors to line of business systems.

Whether lifting and shifting existing systems or building new ones in the cloud, you must go beyond just load-balancing within one or two data centers. Your websites and APIs must be distributed globally so customers and employees are automatically directed to the nearest data centers for the best performance. Additionally, the databases that power these systems must be replicated everywhere so everyone is looking at the same data. One word of caution I’d pass along is to be cognizant of data sovereignty requirements that may limit data flow to a particular region or country.

Improve user productivity and increase revenue by providing fast and reliable access to corporate data to employees anywhere in the world. What is your organization doing to support its global workforce?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

Book Cover

Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Improve Employee Productivity by Delivering Web Scale to your Mobile Workforce

Book Cover

Bring #web scale to backend business systems via adapters, replication, sharding, queuing & caching of #data to support a growing #mobile workforce.

Many of the backend systems running global business over the last several decades have something in common besides not being able to communicate with mobile devices. They’re not designed to support the scale needed to empower today’s mobile workforces. Actually, most of these packages and associated databases were designed for departmental or workgroup use in a world where everyone had a single PC on their desk. The IT infrastructures of most companies are wholly unprepared to support mobility.

Whether you’re wrapping your systems in REST APIs or using a mobile middleware package, you have the ability to boost the scale of those old systems using several clever techniques. For starters, the servers used to create a new mobile API tier should be designed to cache frequently-used data so repeated calls to the backend servers won’t be needed. This could range from a simple file cache, to using staging tables in a database. To scale-out this mobile API tier, data could be replicated across multiple nodes resulting in a sharding architecture that further spreads the load generated by mobile devices making requests. To further de-couple the system, data uploads from mobile apps could be dropped in queues and processed by background processes. All these things will have the effect of boosting both the performance and scalability of your existing backend systems.

Improve User Productivity and reduce expenses by increasing the number of employees and customers served by existing line of business systems. What is your organization doing to beef up its systems to serve more users and devices?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

Book Cover

Click to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!