In a recent Gartner study, mobile was ranked as the top most disruptive technology in the enterprise—above Big Data, social media, and the public cloud. As mobile devices become the primary screen for consumer engagement, business needs to adapt to new demands.
Scaling and Adapting to Mobile
Old-school web architectures were built for desktops with data, logic, and presentation organized neatly in three tiers, so it’s no surprise that CIOs are looking for a better architectural approach that can scale and adapt to the special challenges of mobile. In a recent report, Forrester proposes a loosely coupled four-tier architecture.
A four-tier architecture splits the application tier into two: one tier devoted to aggregation and the other devoted to delivery. The aggregation tier allows organizations to build and adapt to a variety of devices, and the delivery tier uses intelligence from the client layer to deliver contextually appropriate content so data can scale out independently from your operations.
The Journey to Four-Tier
We are just now seeing early implementations of a four-tier engagement platform, but for most, the full journey will take place over several years. Read the report to discover Forrester’s predictions for a mobile-first economy through 2023.
