Four essential new IT architecture paradigms for digital business success
In the two decades since the dot-com boom, the digital revolution has dramatically transformed our world.
We’re now living with countless mobile devices providing digital surfaces to access a broad range of applications, many of which can be changed on the fly. Thousands of new applications emerge every day to help business achieve better customer reach and higher sales.
None of this would be possible without the new and more efficient IT and architecture paradigms.
For businesses to remain competitive in this dynamic environment, keeping up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies is not enough. They need to stay ahead of the competition.
As winners separate themselves from the rest of the pack, they’re employing New IT paradigms (and recognizing the “changing face” of IT) in ways that provide more agility, higher productivity and improved software quality for competitive edge.
Just what are these new IT architecture paradigms?
Internet giants such as Amazon, Facebook and Google were among the New IT early movers, and thanks to their success, these practices became mainstream. From an IT architecture perspective, New IT trends and technologies can be divided into four categories:
To accommodate increasing demands of multiple functionalities, IT solutions have become more complex, both in terms of coding and in integration and interaction with other modules, systems and platforms.
Since the mid-1990s, IT architecture transitioned from solid, monolithic mainframe into horizontally-layered, decoupled architectures. The layered structure in services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) brought many advantages, the most important the simplification by reutilizing components in the layers above it, without duplicating services or components every time.
However, if a specific functionality needs to be updated, it still requires testing with all its integrated components which directly impacts timelines and the agility of deployment to production.
In recent years, we’ve seen a new IT architecture paradigm in which platforms evolved into vertically decoupled systems. Vertical decoupling identifies parts of an application that need higher agility or more frequent changes, and isolates that functionality from the rest of the application.
The smaller isolated components can then be updated and tested and deployed to production without touching the other components allowing much better agility than before.
These “liquid” structures can be achieved through efficient modular design and use of APIs and micro-services. Many large internet platforms, such as Netflix, Google, Facebook and Amazon, have already gone this route, enabling them to change production multiple times a day, rather than month.
