Technology industry constantly goes through up-gradation or evolvement. Each cycle of development is specifically targeted towards a detailed requirement of the enterprise. The development taps into the product/ service transforming the performance, security, and pricing. For example, the development of computing and data storage started with centralization – Mainframe, decentralization with personal computers and centralization again with the cloud.
The man-machine interface is also going through a great length of transformations with graphical interface evolving from the textual interactions that were seen before. Composite User Interface (CUI) that will help the system to have more than one sense. Currently, the major usage is based on visual, multimedia, and contact. The next stage for which the development has already begun is augmented reality and virtual reality introducing more sensory features.
The user experience has been a definitive change that has helped in building the market majority for the enterprises. The human-machine interaction has led to a race that introduces a human factor in the machine so it becomes part of the body. Enterprises are heavily investing in the technology of user experience and the solutions might differ for each requirement let’s look into details.
SOFTWARE-DEFINED STRUCTURE
Over the last decade or so we have seen the rapid deployment of cloud computing resources for all type of enterprises. The deployment has changed the scenario of development wherein the only software and hardware defined with considerable characteristics with the cloud. Enterprises have seen rapid implementation of Virtualization for networking, storage, computing, and other searchable resources. Virtualization has defined the enterprise’s requirements catering to flexibility and applications.
The virtualization trend was started by the VMware followed by the other providers-AWS, Microsoft and Rackspace. The deployment of hyper-converged infrastructure has blurred the lines between the infrastructure and the enterprise software. The initial infrastructure resources that required deployment, installing and usage had faded, they now required single deployment and management. Reducing the hardware cost and easing the development structure of applications.
The allocation of infrastructure became an easy option for the enterprises, with the emergence of elasticity as a trend. The definition of elasticity for any business application means that the application is currently working on the software-defined infrastructure. The storage requirements can be altered as the computing requirement changes. This provides the elasticity of resources and application.
There is an old saying “That comes in with a facility actually enhance the activity of certain system/ products”. In our case, it’s the adoption of the cloud with virtualization that’s giving the enterprises the option to deal with resources requirements without any delays. The consumption of cloud computing is on the rise across the world and this is pushing the provisioning and the maintenance. This requires a proper functional user interface to provide an overview of the total functionalities that can be controlled.
USER INTERFACE A NEED
Enterprises that constantly develop new applications or adds new features need a recurring up-gradation of resources- servers and storage. Stability of the actions, time and repeatability are common requirements we see during the up-gradation. This makes the total task cumbersome and demanding with a user interface that supports the requirement.
Also, the human-error element also makes a huge impact as the configuration can be repetitively inattentive. The up-gradation of any resource plays an important role in the security and setting the configuration of the upgrade. The complex step by step process increases the chances of the errors that can damage the security and also hamper the functionality. The availability of the human element also important before the stages of deployment will reduce the speed of the process.
Here are some of the critical tasks,
- Auditing for the uniformity to maintain the configuration across the database
- Flexibility to deal with the configurations of the cloud
- Documentation of the approval cycle for all the configuration changes
API AND AUTOMATION
Using the current Graphical interface can be an impossible task to support all the applications. Having a uniform support element that can help in maintaining the business software and infrastructure that can treat the configuration as data. It can be uniformly managed using the versioning tools and via APIs. Automation tools such as Chef, Ansible, Puppet or other infrastructure as code tools can act as a perfect solution for the uniform automation deployment.
GUIs cannot just be replaced by other technologies instead they can be used in the places wherein the decision support is needed for the action completion. IT products can greatly be made more effective with visualization, interactive navigation and keeping the complex data sets programmed. Automation and APIs will reduce the time-consuming tasks of configuration and also result in better deployment.
EXAMPLE OF THE API FOR BETTER SYSTEM CONFIGURATION
Healthcare sector dealing with the myriad of applications need something that converges all the data types based on the requirement. The interoperability between internal apps, EHRs, and other data exchange tools adopted the Application Programming Interface (API). An API is an interface that allows the data flow between different application maintains the sustainability of the system. API can be used in the case of configuration based on the requirement, automating the necessary tasks and reducing the interference. To now know more about the recent development in IT infrastructure you can download our whitepapers.
