As your business grows, the number of users engaging with your business’s application increases as well, which can affect its performance if it’s not scalable for a significant amount of growth. That’s where scalable software comes in.
What Is a Scalable Application?
A scalable application refers to your software’s ability to handle a spike of users without slowing down functionality. When your application slows down, its productivity decreases significantly due to high user volume.
Why Is Scaling Up Applications Important?
Mobile and web application development is an extensive process. During the development period, you’ll realize what works best for your organization’s application and what doesn’t. When you discover a solution that works, the last thing you want is for it to crash or slow down due to user growth.
An application should always have the ability to deliver a great experience to users, no matter how many are using the platform. Unfortunately, many times application issues occur in response to growth because the software wasn’t initially built or designed for a large number of users. When developing an application, it’s crucial to regularly maintain it to ensure it’s suited for a spike in user engagement.
Maintaining app scalability is vital for many industries, including:
Business Enterprises
Scalable application development and cloud migration are essential for business growth. Building and implementing software that simplifies tasks and eliminates inefficiencies sets up your business for future success.
In today’s business environment, using various tools to complete a single task isn’t sustainable or productive for your business’s operations. Full-cycle business app development and design addresses any challenges you face or may encounter with seamless mobile and cloud integration.
An efficient approach to business software development should be designed to deliver agility, user-friendly tools, minimal maintenance, unlimited scalability, and integrated mobile access.
Government Entities
Citizens drive government and municipal operations, so it’s vital to acquire scalable software that best serves them. Building scalable software streamlines workflows, prioritizes citizen satisfaction, and gets you and your team out of the office and into the community. A scalable software should help consolidate and unify all aspects of government and municipal operations, including permitting, inspection, planning, zoning, and more.
Education Institutions
Most challenges that education institutions face when it comes to their software is access to social support resources, the ability to track student discipline and progress monitoring, and work order efficiency.
Ready-made software solutions should help education administrators prioritize student engagement. In addition, a scalable software approach for education institutions should integrate all aspects of academic operations, including facility management, human resources, logistics, administrations, and accounting.
Nonprofit Organizations
The software needs of nonprofit organizations are fundamentally different from other industries. For instance, most businesses implement new software to enhance application efficiency and profitability. On the other hand, nonprofits implement new software to measure their success; they generally base their measure of success on the amount of good they’re able to accomplish and how many people they’ve had the opportunity to help.
WiseHope Benevolence Tracking Software
WiseHope is a software that helps nonprofit organizations track real-time donation information. This software empowers your team with the tools they need to ensure charitable donations are distributed with equity and accountability; it also prioritizes confidentiality and data security.
How Do I Scale up My Software?
Before you decide to scale up your software, it’s crucial to recognize if your software needs to scale vertically or if you need to invest in horizontal scaling.
Vertical Scaling
Vertical scaling is the process of resizing your server’s capacity without changing your system’s code; it gives you the ability to increase existing hardware or software volume by implementing additional resources.
Vertical scaling is most commonly used in applications of small- and medium-sized establishments. This scaling option is limited since you can only get as big as the size of the server. A downfall of vertical scaling is that even after an improved performance, the downtime risk is much higher than horizontal scaling.
Horizontal Scaling
Horizontal scaling is the ability to scale wider, giving you a greater range to deal with incoming application traffic. Through horizontal scaling, you have the opportunity to connect more hardware and software products—including servers—so they can work as a collective unit.
Unlike vertical scaling, horizontal scaling takes time and strategy to develop and cannot be executed immediately. Scaling horizontally involves adding additional systems and machines to your database, which can take time for implementation. Horizontal scaling is generally used for high levels of computing for applications and services.
Perform a Software Scalability Analysis
A software scalability analysis—also known as scalability testing—tests a software application, measuring its ability to scale up (vertical scaling) or scale out (horizontal scaling) in terms of its non-functional capability. Through this analysis, software quality analysts test the application’s performance and reliability:
Performance testing—also known as load testing, this identifies how the application performs in terms of responsiveness and stability under a high user environment
Reliability testing—the application’s ability to function under a high user environment for an extensive amount of time
A software scalability analysis proposes new ways for you to scale up or out the application, allowing the number of active users to increase while minimizing the risk of losing productivity.
Make the Wise Choice
Wise Technology takes an agile, open-minded approach to software development that’s focused on simplifying everyday tasks. We offer everything from ready-made solutions to full-cycle development to address all of your software needs and goals, either as a one-time project or a long-term partnership.
While we have ready-made software for the business, educational, government, and nonprofit sectors, our team draws on nearly four decades of software experience that we can use to adapt our approach to solve virtually any problem in any industry. Contact us to ensure software scalability!
