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Rapid mobile application development vendors offer a variety of options, from low-code and no-code platforms to micro apps, workflow apps and more.
Rapid application development tools can help organizations more easily mobilize business processes and workflows.
The demand for enterprise mobile apps has never been greater, but it remains complex and expensive to build and deploy them. Rapid mobile application development tools aim to break down these barriers.
Some of these tools enable employees with little to no coding skills to build apps using a graphical user interface. Others create simple apps that perform only a few tasks — or even just one.
Several vendors on the market take these and other approaches. Let’s take a look at them and their rapid application development tools.
Alpha Anywhere, Alpha Software Corp.’s platform, provides both no- and low-code rapid application development tools. Developers and others can use these tools to create web apps, hybrid mobile apps — through integration with Adobe’s PhoneGap Build service — and mobile forms.
With Alpha Anywhere’s offline capabilities, users of apps built on the platform can save data on their devices if they don’t have internet connectivity. Also, IT can control how that data synchronizes with back-end applications and databases when a connection is restored.
State, county, & local governments are unique. From constricted budgets to needing to protect large numbers of devices and users, governments face a unique set requirement for data protection and business continuity.
Unitrends has a long history of protecting governmental IT assets, with customers ranging from small towns to major state agencies protecting the data and applications of thousands of employees.- Government data backup
Here are the challenges unique to state and local governments and how Unitrends meets them.
Governments create and manage large amounts of private data such as criminal records, tax reports, and court documents. Unitrends appliances can replicate data locally, to a remote site or to our highly secure Unitrends Cloud.
From any of those locations, data can be stored for long-term retention and/or used for disaster recovery purposes.
Most state, county, and local governments have few IT resources with little time to spend managing backups and
recovery. Unitrends’ products are designed for a set-it-and-forget-it style of use with emails that report backup results so you always know things are working properly. Continue reading
Threat actors are increasing their use of fileless malware for one simple reason: most organizations aren’t prepared to detect it. Education is the first step in determining what threat these new attacks pose and what you can do to detect and stop fileless malware attacks.
Fileless malware is a significant and increasing threat. While awareness of that fact is growing, there’s still confusion among security practitioners and vendors about the nature of the threat and the requirements for a successful defense strategy.
Part of that confusion is because of most of the security methods, solutions and routines used to detect and prevent cyber security threats remain firmly grounded in addressing file-based attacks. As with any new type of cyber threat, many security-focused professionals need a point of reference, or newsworthy attack, as their driver for altering, updating or replacing their current security workflows.
The goal of every security organization is not to be the first victim of that attack.
A recent survey by Ponemon, the 2017 State of Endpoint Security Risk, showed that fileless attacks rose, as a percent of all malware attacks, from 20% in 2016 to 29% in 2017. It estimated that in 2018, fileless attacks would rise to 35%. Of the 54% of respondents that indicated they were compromised by at least one attack, 77% said those successful
breaches were from fileless attacks. Continue reading
The adoption of highly scriptable cloud-based technologies, along with the emergence of continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) tools, has created an environment in which every operations process should be
scriptable and all manual processes targeted for database automation. Organizations with a DevOps approach to application lifecycle management should automate every process imaginable, but they often hit a wall when they reach the persistence layer. Emerging technologies have the potential to make that limitation disappear.
“Database release automation is a real problem,” Datical CTO Robert Reeves says. “You’ve got lots of great ways of automating the application and provisioning servers. But we are still asking DBAs [database administrators] to just work faster, work harder, as they do manual updates.”
So, why can’t we take the lessons we learned from Agile or the progress DevOps has made and apply them to the persistence layer?
“Because of state,” Reeves explains. Unlike applications, a database can’t simply be deleted and recreated on the fly as though you were deploying and undeploying a microservice packaged in a Docker container. “You can’t just zap it.” Continue reading
According to a report by Small Business Advocate, of all the companies in the US, 99.7% are small businesses, and that number’s not at all surprising.- Accounting Software Solutions
Small businesses — also known as small and medium-sized enterprises, or SMEs — are the backbone of any economy, but they also face some of the most difficult challenges in their day-to-day operations. Challenges such as targeting new customers while retaining current ones, raising brand awareness, finding competent and motivated employees and much more are a daily struggle. And they have to do all of this while keeping a finger on the pulse of the current trends and technologies in their industry.
Still, one of the biggest problems businesses face is cash flow issues. While sometimes that’s a result of economic downturn, more often it’s caused by poor planning within the company.
That’s why professional accounting software solutions for small business is in such high demand. Many savvy small business owners are realizing that in order to ensure steady growth of a business, they must utilize professional accounting help. Continue reading
From artificial intelligence to augmented reality, these dozen disruptive technologies and trends will begin driving how business gets done at forward-thinking organizations this year. – Technologies disruption 
In 2018, disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and computer vision are maturing, going from game-changing ideas to foundational tools for business. This year, we’ll see these and other technologies drive how business gets done and what new products will launch in the near future.
To get a sense of what’s ahead for this year, we looked at the technologies experts say are most likely to affect a wide variety of organizations as they undergo digital transformations. Pros in these fields gave us their top picks for what should be on your radar, as well as some insight into the implications of adopting these new technologies.
Last month, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase announced a joint venture with a focus on using technology to offer their employees and their families “simplified, high-quality and transparent healthcare at a reasonable cost.” Health insurance stocks dropped on the news, as industry watchers theorized how new technology might broadly affect health care.
Some analysts see gains already being made in preventative care. In 2018 Tech Market research firm ABI forecasts that businesses will widely adopt remote patient monitoring, with 18 million wearables incorporated into corporate wellness programs. The firm predicts that number to jump to 44 million by 2021. Continue reading
It seems like every year will be — or at least should be — the year of software engineering quality, but somehow 2018 feels different. Pride in workmanship is what drives developers to create better software, and that can’t be
standardized.
A 2017 survey conducted by research firm Coleman Parkes for the software analysis and measurement company Cast asked developers what factors led them to produce high-quality software. Respondents didn’t cite industry standards much (just 8%) and instead said they were inspired by pride in workmanship (20% of those surveyed).That’s great, as far as it goes, but Bill Curtis, chief scientist at Cast, said much bigger forces will also put software engineering quality under the microscope.
Security breaches and app failures mean quality is now a boardroom-level issue, he said, and that will mean sweeping changes in software development trends. In 2017, just one-third of developers were actually graded on software engineering quality, the Cast survey showed. That will change. “IT organizations will demand greater accountability from their software suppliers and will request a certification of code quality, with penalties when it is insufficient, in 2018,” Curtis said.
Software engineering quality has been completely insufficient for far too long, according to app users, said Theresa Lanowitz, head analyst at Voke Research. Consumers are tired of apps that don’t work, and she tied that directly to the trend in software development to focus on speed rather than quality. Continue reading
Throwing artificial intelligence (AI) at your data to answer business questions is like using a tornado to blow out a match. In other words, just because artificial intelligence tools can provide answers doesn’t mean you should use 
them. If good old business intelligence tools do the job just fine, stick with what you know. But AI is a great way to uncover information hidden within vast amounts of data – as long as you’re willing to use the information that surprises you, according to Jana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics, a synaptic intelligence company based in Cambridge, Mass.
“If you aren’t willing to learn, don’t do an AI project. Do a regular analytics project,” Eggers said during her presentation at the TDWI Accelerate conference in Boston earlier this year.
That’s sound advice in a time when all we hear about is the power and promise of AI technologies like cognitive computing, natural language processing, and machine learning. Using AI judiciously can save companies a whole lot of time and money on a tech that’s exciting but may not be appropriate for the job. It’s also important to carefully Continue reading
Where Do Core Applications Belong? IT leaders are caught in a dilemma when it comes to deployment of core 
enterprise applications. One side is continuing the expensive and time-intensive effort to maintain and adapt legacy applications, even though it seems they increasingly hinder business activity rather than help it. – Enterprise Applications
The other side is adopting new applications that run in the cloud—an environment that offers promising potential, but is also unfamiliar and may be perceived as risky. Until recently, enterprises used the cloud only for new applications or for those specific to an individual department or business unit. Now, with the growing strength of cloud application offerings, enterprises are starting to consider replacing the core applications traditionally hosted in on-premises systems and put those in the cloud, too.
The success of any move to the cloud depends in part on the architecture that underlies the cloud service or application. When looking at potential cloud solutions for core systems, it is important to understand the different cloud architectures and how they impact application capabilities and performance—and the difference that makes for migration from current systems. Continue reading
Legacy technology can hinder your ability to meet changing market dynamics. Here’s how to prioritize and execute IT modernization efforts that drive business value.- legacy IT systems
The IT stack at Live Nation Entertainment resembled the setup typically found at most companies of any substantial size and age: a mix of new systems with some older hardware and software.
Similarly, Live Nation found itself in another typical situation: trying to move at the speed of business while dealing with legacy systems not up to the task.
Those situations drove the company’s decision to ramp up modernization, says Jake Burns, the vice president of cloud services at the Beverly Hills-based global entertainment company.
“For a couple of years, I and my peers were starting to feel that way. But then, at the end of 2015, the senior leadership made a decision to modernize IT. It became my project in 2016,” he says.
Since then Burns has led Live Nation’s multiphase modernization efforts. The first phase involved ditching much of the corporate on-premises data center and migrating its applications to AWS, a move that increased efficiency and speed while decreasing costs. Continue reading