Building And Supporting Mobile Apps In The Cloud

April 13, 2017

Contributed Commentary By Gurpreet Kanwar

April 13, 2017 | Contributed Commentary |  Mobile application development is a term used to denote the act or process by which application software is developed for mobile devices and it is growing steadily and at a rapid pace. With the increase in the usage of cloud technology, mobile development is the need of the hour. Most of the major products now have mobile modules attached and sometimes even provided as incentive to increase their sales. Mobile development has also brought changes to project management methodology in organizations. Cohesiveness and synergy between various teams is now more visible than ever.

Why Mobile Development?

Creating and designing a mobile application for your business allows your customers to find you, access your services, and further invest themselves in your product. Here in my organization which deals in providing safety through service using mobile products and mobile applications is gaining popularity with increase demand for mobile devices. With any mobile product, the cloud discussion comes automatically and our organization selected Microsoft cloud.

Why Cloud?

Cloud is maturing and organizations are finding substantial benefits in leveraging its elasticity and agility to provide better solutions to their clients. Whether you like it or not, cloud computing is here, and it’s not “will you” but “when will you” adapt.

A cloud strategy must be in place to determine when to use cloud services and when not to use them. A proper governance model must be established to determine specific policies and principles for cloud computing. This should also cover whether to have product on premise or in the cloud

Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are three major players that provide enterprise cloud services. We are major users of Microsoft products like MS Office and new Office 365 for consumers, so it was easy to move toward the Microsoft cloud. Licenses agreements also played a major role in our decision making.

Once a cloud platform has been chosen, it’s time to consider how data will be accessed, protected, and to formulate a disaster recovery plan. It’s wise to consider several questions under each topic:

Data access

  • Who will have access to the data, and how can we confirm this?
  • Does the cloud provider have the right security controls to protect our data?
  • How will the cloud provider ensure that others (i.e. those whose data reside on the same server as ours) are not able to access our data?

Data protection

  • How will data be protected?
  • What controls does the cloud provider have in place for intrusion detection, perimeter security, physical security, application of security patches, and data-leak prevention, among other safety measures?
  • What policies and procedures are in place to detect, prevent, and mitigate identity theft?
  • Have there been any instances of identity theft experienced by the vendor in the last two years?

Disaster recovery & business continuity planning

  • Does the cloud provider have a disaster recovery plan?
  • In the event of a disaster, how will the cloud provider protect our information assets?
  • Can we get our data back if the cloud provider goes out of business?
  • Does the cloud provider allow third-party verification?


Editor’s note: If you’re interested in an overview of this area, along with various techniques, approaches, and framework for executing a mobile project, consider Workshop 3 at the 2017 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo: “Delivering Custom Mobile App Projects to the Cloud”, Tuesday, May 23, 2017, 8:00 - 11:30 am. The workshop will be taught by Gurpreet Kanwar from NAV CANADA, and will cover executing mobile projects framework, learning about various issues to know before starting mobile projects, and project framework for mobile cloud projects.