Custom Web App Development Company

As you’ve probably discerned by now, we like to use houses as analogies for apps. As it relates to scaling, we ask our clients to visualize a house party with a ton of people in attendance. If there’s a bottleneck and people are crowding in front of the house, it could be because your sidewalk isn’t wide enough to welcome everyone in at the same time. It could also be because your house is too small to host everyone at once.  As this relates to apps, increasing the number of servers (called horizontal scaling) is the same as widening the sidewalk to let more people through. Increasing the size/power of your existing server (vertically scaling) is the same as building a bigger house. Setting up the proper architecture from the beginning gives you the flexibility to consider either or both as your app grows in reach and usage.

As our company and the industry overall have innovated, so have cyber criminals. In fact, cybercrime is now the third largest economy in the world behind the US and China. The requirements for threat protection are as vast and as fluid as the number of threats. As cyber criminals innovate, so must you. Thinking through data encryption, authentication, and access controls is critical—especially when it comes to HIPAA-compliant apps. Additionally, as GDPR-style privacy laws spread throughout the U.S., determining how you will collect and protect end-user data is critical.

Regulations, and InsuranceNow more than ever, architecture design needs to incorporate your business’s IT or cybersecurity requirements. Sometimes these requirements are driven by industry standards; other times, your own internal security playbooks are a primary consideration. Designing architecture requirements without regard for insurance or regulatory perspectives can make for more costly changes later down the timeline of project delivery.

Sometimes, technical requirements can be at odds with each other. For instance, there are certain technical requirements that demand near-zero latency while others that require higher security protocols. Doing the work to define and prioritize requirements is important to design the right type of architecture.

When making decisions related to performance, there are several important factors to consider including the need for speed within the confines of your platform choice (web vs. mobile); how much data you are moving back and forth; and your ongoing budget for server spend.

Flexibility and InteroperabilityWe design your architecture the same way we design your apps—using industry best practices including thorough documentation, flexibility to adapt to changing requirements over time, and the ability to integrate nicely with other tools.

The big three hosting providers (GCP, Azure, and AWS) have great out-of-the-box tools for redundancy and backups. However, you still need to consider how to configure your account and design your architecture for managing server crashes and network problems as well as building a recovery plan in case of total loss, including those losses resulting from cybercrime.

We finalize your architecture design by balancing your budget against all other items listed above, and then testing that design against your business goals. Furthermore, we’re careful to educate you on the various costs associated with your project along the way (monthly hosting is a commonly overlooked item) to avoid any financial surprises.