Software as a Service, which allows companies to avoid upfront licensing fees for software and hardware, is known as Software as a Service.
SaaS vendors sometimes guarantee their data-centre uptime, also maintaining their software so that it can be quickly updated to minimise zero-day attacks, making SaaS apps more user-friendly while helping companies achieve an often better return on investment (ROI).
Microservices architecture
Microservices architecture is becoming a new paradigm in the software development domain. It is rapidly spreading all across the world, transforming business environments. By developing application systems in the form of autonomous services, we can increase agility, flexibility and scalability of application development projects.
Crucially, this drastically reduces the amount of team productivity needed in order to operate, allowing for faster and more reliable development and deployment cycles – as each team is limited to only one feature at any one time.
This reliability can come from microservices, by splitting up functionality such that individual services have their own separate databases and schema – meaning that, should there be issues with a single service, it doesn’t jeopardise other parts of the system.
Low-Code/No-Code (LCNC) programming
By lowering the barriers for programming, these low-code/no-code platforms allow users from any kind of business, from an office administrator to a small-business owner, to create software without having to learn how to code, thus providing greater agility and benefit for their organisations, and enabling them to deliver applications that help them meet business needs all the more quickly.
LCNC platforms are typically used by IT developers with more advanced coding skills to build bespoke applications, but LOB teams are increasingly using them for easier development. Their understandability also makes them a good choice because business users might need to debug them or rectify problems.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Entrepreneurs and executives are beginning to recognise how AI can increase engagement with customers, and enable the business community to operate more efficiently. This is dramatically transforming AI into one of the most important strategic assets a business can have.
The rise of gen AI is altering skill needs and creating whole new avenues of revenue for firms. Firms that do best at Gen AI set clear AI targets that link to tangible business outcomes and invest in reskilling human capital.
With multimodal deep learning, a company can use the deep-learning insights they have attained with voice and video interactions from agents – whether agents are virtual or human – to perform interactions with its human agents. One example of this is the app Be My Eyes, which takes advantage of multimodal AI to allow blind and low-vision users to complete tasks (unfamiliar tasks!) of everyday life without waiting for human support from other registered volunteers who are willing to help.
Cloud services
Without them, today’s sophisticated computing world simply could not exist. Often referred to by their popular acronym, cloud services have become unavoidable technologies, giving us previously unimaginable scalability and performance in computing, and ushering in radical changes in how we do business and build our world.
SaaS makes business life easier by taking away the pain of operating your own servers or running software in-house (that’s expensive!), as well as the overhead of applying software updates or otherwise scaling up or down, depending on your business needs. AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are several examples of companies offering this kind of solution.
Native app development
Yet the choices to be made at every step of the mobile app development process can have a huge impact on the form and function of their final products. Will a cross-platform or a native framework be used to build the app? A brief glance at your phone shows how the impact of this decision affects performance, readability and overall presentation.
By writing native apps for such a codebase, these apps are able to take advantage of native device features in a native way, and provide the same native user experience across mobile devices with different-size displays, like foldable smartphones or wearables, for instance. This is all particularly important in cases like this one, where user interaction might actually differ substantially across devices with different-size displays compared with standard smartphones – foldables, for example.
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)
These are progressive web apps (PWAs), which are applications that support a native app look and feel, are fast to load and provide an offline experience for users. The compelling factor for businesses to take advantage of PWAs is that they seamlessly work with push notifications to keep users engaged even when the app is closed.
That means PWAs are indexable by Google, and they can be shared with a URL, removing the need to download/install an app. They still need the HTTPS connection and web app manifest to function properly.
Cybersecurity
With employees suddenly working from home in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and all the attendant cybersecurity risks, ‘In some cases, there was no security vetting. Attackers exploited this and started using LinkedIn to target victims.
As companies have to abide by data residency issues and localised security measures, DevSecOps will become increasingly important, and it should be applied to every detail from the collection to the utilisation of data. ‘Experience’: The process of designing, managing and utilising customer interactions that not only harmonise with a user’s experience but also create value through human-centred design principles of the digital economy.
GenAI will enhance the effectiveness of cybersecurity solutions by allowing humans to focus on complex problems, rather than mundane, low-level tasks, and will also allow humans to identify complex threats and rapidly analyse vast sets of data. Among security leaders, continuous threat exposure management will become a top priority by 2024.
Internet of Behavior (IoB)
Now with SaaS – short for ‘software as a service’ – business software is available 24/7, not just to employees but also to customers. Accessing the software is easier than ever: from anywhere online. And it’s more productive than ever before, too, which means customer service can begin to improve, not worsen. This enables companies to increase productivity without sacrificing service.
SaaS vendors guarantee ‘two or three nines’ of available uptime through an SLA, and regularly patch their software so as to avoid zero-day attacks – with no expenditure on hardware or business software upfront.
Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)
AR and VR technologies are quickly becoming a crucial part of the business landscape, while also capitalising on new ways to grasp customer needs by refining the process.
AR represents the next step in the evolution of visual overlay data technologies that superimpose digital realities on the world around us – for example, data about tourist locations or user manuals for repair technicians – making them instantly visible via the screen in our hands and, hence, saving us both time and increasing productivity.
Arguably, AR is the more promising technology because devices are lightweight and the demand on graphics generation is low, which makes it more suitable to business applications.