Transform Software Systems and Aid Modernization with Key Enterprise Architectures

Bringing together business applications within a single organization is a big deal. Doing so across multiple similar or different organizations is an even greater challenge.

When you set out to unify standalone — or so-called siloed — systems under one umbrella, you can accomplish much with different types of enterprise architecture:

• One platform for all
• Control and transparency
• Unified UX/UI design
• Unified storage facilities
• Reduced expenses on computing resources to maintain your infrastructure
• Simplified maintenance and tech support load
• And, in most cases, updates and/or new features can be rolled out without major disruptions

Building a unified point of access from barely related parts requires a deep understanding of large system architectures, business logic, and careful execution. One wrong implementation could have a domino effect, and you may have to regularly patch up inconsistencies on completion of the merger.

This article will clarify how to integrate software systems and what the different types of enterprise architecture achieve.

Exploring Different Types of Enterprise Architecture in a Business Context

Your business needs to define your digital ventures and not the other way around.

Maybe you have multiple platforms with legacy code and databases that you’re trying to gather under one roof. You could also be a well-established business with overarching architecture, your own legacy code, and complementary systems you would like to integrate. Perhaps you’ve decided to synthesize a few systems to strengthen your market presence.

Either way, you strive to reduce complexity and redundancy while keeping your eye on the prize — the desired business outcomes. This may involve transparent access, better performance, convenient data management, or improved customer service — better yet, all of these.

Giving Software Systems a Remake

‘Platform modernization’ is what everybody in the industry calls vast system transformations. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The name sounds impressive, as is the effort required to achieve outstanding results.

Once you decide to pursue platform modernization, you’ll likely start by analyzing the layers of enterprise architecture to determine how to improve your business so that it stays relevant and in demand.

Think of system architectures as a house floor plan. It shows you how rooms can be paired and connected as parts of the whole construction. Rooms, in this analogy, represent your systems. Maybe you want to add something; perhaps you want to demolish something and build something new. You start by creating a sketch to see how it all fits within the bigger picture.

Much like this sketch, platform modernization only starts after you’ve finalized the architectural plans. Once you set the business standard, system architects turn it into a roadmap. They need to consolidate your business needs, user interfaces, and engineering constraints. Only then can development begin.

By looking at your current software systems and how they’re linked, you’ll understand what you should or shouldn’t do.

Retired Enterprise Architecture That Has to Be Reinvented

Your enterprise architecture is so outdated and expensive to support that you need to retire it altogether and migrate your end users to the new platform. Having ‘outdated’ architecture means you’re supporting systems written in a programming language that has simply died out.

As programming languages and technologies evolve, the experts who can support your outdated platform systems also thin out. Retraining rookie developers to work with outdated technology can cost you a pretty penny. In this case, platform modernization becomes your only option.

For instance, several notable businesses and institutions used PL/I (Programming Language One) during the 1960s and 1970s. General Motors utilized PL/I for engineering applications, simulations, and various manufacturing processes. However, the company had to move to modern technologies and programming languages to continue supporting its engineering, manufacturing, and business operations.

Principal Enterprise Architecture That Dictates All Add-Ons

You already have a multifaceted business model that combines several systems linked to a predetermined architecture type. This so-called ‘mother’ architecture dictates how you add other systems to the core, and there is hardly any deviation from the preset course.

Sovereign Enterprise Architecture That Allows Autonomy and Flexibility

You may have an enterprise architecture that doesn’t dictate how to treat any consequent integration. In this case, you could simply consider how to link your new systems or build more systems on top of what you already have.

Our client was looking to unite companies they had acquired with the existing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform in their portfolio. Their two million active users were a rich legacy of the successful business they had conducted so far. Our client couldn’t risk losing their clientele, nor could they afford to spread their resources thin across redundant infrastructures. Apart from some overlapping functions, these products also featured multiple unique client-critical features.

Our client faced an overarching challenge related to the different types of enterprise architecture already in place and moving their customers and pertaining data. That meant getting the best of both worlds in one unified software platform.

After a careful software audit and collaboration with our client’s business development unit, we came up with layers of enterprise architecture that could hold the new implementation and still benefit from the working systems. As a result, our client had no functional gaps and incorporated excellent prior implementations in between the transition.

Given the unique nature of each company’s software history, architecture scenarios can be truly intricate.

The Different Types of Enterprise Architectures Seen Through a Business Logic Lens

Once you have audited your software system, you’ll be able to answer the following questions:

Key Components of Enterprise Architecture

Different types of enterprise architecture still follow the same enterprise architecture components. As a business, you decide what processes you want to digitize and plan the overarching system strategy. Then, you consider how to manage data within the systems. Once you have that settled, you start crafting the actual solution roadmap and matching it with the appropriate technology that circles back to your business objectives.

Components of Enterprise Architecture

Event-Driven Architecture with Fast Track Business Processes

Event-driven architecture (EDA) allows system components to communicate and react to events, which usually cause significant changes in state. Imagine an online retail store that handles various operations such as order processing, inventory management, and user notifications. The store needs EDA to ensure it can react to events as they occur.

Say a user places an order for a set of headphones. Immediately, this ‘event’ occurs in the system. It signals the inventory to ‘secure’ this headphone set. Once the user pays, another ‘event’ will signal that the headphone set is ready for shipment.

EDA is reactive and promotes loose coupling and asynchronous communication. While loose coupling reduces interdependencies between different parts of a system, asynchronous communication in computer systems helps different parts of a system perform their numerous actions before the final result.

For example, if you submit a support ticket asking for help with a product, you immediately get confirmation that your request was received, even though no one has read it yet. Behind the scenes, your request is being processed by various services, and you’ll get updates via email later.

In the enterprise context, event-driven architecture integrates and combines standalone systems or applications that may not communicate with each other, bypassing isolation and inefficiencies. EDA enables isolated systems to respond to real-time data and operations, processing millions of simultaneous requests.

Service-Oriented Architecture With Reusable Functionality

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architecture pattern in which software components are exposed as services that communicate over a network. Each service provides a specific business functionality and can be reused across different applications.

SOA allows you to:

You can encapsulate business logic into services with well-defined interfaces, allowing interoperability between disparate systems.

Modular Monolith Architecture with Compatible Service Modules

Monolith architectures entail either a modular character or an interconnected, intertwined system. Simply put, you have either ‘spaghetti code’ which is hard to untangle or well-organized modules within a monolith system.

The image below shows the two overarching natures of a monolithic and a modular monolithic architecture. While both are monoliths, how they are designed under the hood will define your architecture course for platform modernization.

You’ll find that monolith architectures cannot be taken apart. The whole system shares one code base, coupling all business concerns together. Updating a monolith system requires modifying the entire code base and redeploying user-facing interfaces. Thus, adding functionality or introducing fixes and improvements to a monolith system becomes restrictive and time-consuming.

If you’re facing the challenge of how to mix and match a monolithic architecture, you’ll find it nearly impossible to extract the functionality you need. So, chances are high that you’ll refactor or re-architect the whole system for your business purposes.

On the other hand, modular monolith architectures consist of so-called blocks — modules containing designated functionality — that you can single out and take out. You won’t necessarily have to rewrite the code of a particular module because it works as is and can be reused. You can also refactor or update individual modules you’d like to include in your modernization strategy.

Microservices Architecture with Clear-Cut Functionality Blocks

Microservices architecture allows you to structure an application as a collection of small, independent, and loosely coupled services. Each service covers a specific business function and can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently.

In microservices architectures, you can deploy and scale services at will, allowing for more agile development and operations.

This image shows how a user interacts with the system through an interface. The interface layers serve as the “traffic patrol” and connect the user request with the necessary functionality. You can treat each service component as a standalone unit, yet one unified interface gives you access to multiple features and operations. You can build different microservices using different technologies and languages best suited for each specific task.

One of our clients had a two-decade-old monolith architecture that couldn’t meet their growing business demands. The legacy system was failing to scale, and the on-premise servers became too expensive to support.

The system consisted of a web server with background works hosted as Windows Services and had several SQL servers. The business logic was implemented directly in the SQL Server — a common architecture at the time. The application would experience seasonal load variations, making it challenging and costly to provision or de-provision hardware based on traffic demands.

As the business grew, the application could no longer accommodate the increased scale. Upgrading the servers was too expensive because the SQL Server costs were high and day-to-day maintenance would turn into a nightmare. Critical to the business operations, any system deployments would result in downtimes our client couldn’t ignore.

Since our client’s business had numerous operations, we decided to use the microservices architecture, bringing autonomy and flexibility to the new system. After a rigorous legacy system audit, we re-engineered the application code and test cases to preserve business logic while giving it a total makeover. Consequently, our client moved to the cloud with the ability to scale, save money on maintenance, and balance the user load. Thanks to the microservices and their distributed nature, the new system quickly outperformed the old implementation and eliminated all prior hiccups on the server-facing side.

Hybrid Architecture with Advanced Interoperability and Flexibility

A hybrid architecture is a comprehensive integration pattern that combines systems and technologies on-premise, in the cloud, or in multiple environments. Hybrid architectures allow you to create multiple variations and:

Imagine a large financial institution that operates globally and manages a vast amount of sensitive customer data, transactional information, and financial records. The bank provides real-time financial services, maintains high security standards, and complies with stringent regulatory requirements. The bank’s diversified nature requires combining multiple architectures.

• The hybrid architecture allows the bank to cover all the bases and respond quickly to market changes and customer demands.
• By moving non-critical workloads to the cloud, the bank reduces the need for extensive on-premise infrastructure, optimizing operational costs.
• Maintaining critical operations on-premise ensures compliance with regulatory requirements, while cloud services enhance security through advanced threat detection and response capabilities.
• Integrated cloud services enable personalized and real-time customer interactions, improving overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes ensure that data is consistently updated and available across both platforms.
• The bank offers mobile and web applications hosted in the cloud, providing customers with 24/7 access to their accounts, transaction history, and personalized financial advice. These applications are integrated with the on-premise core banking system for real-time updates.
• The bank leverages cloud platforms for advanced data analytics and machine learning. These platforms process large datasets to generate insights on customer behavior, credit risk analysis, and fraud detection.

Consequently, the bank’s hybrid approach ensures high availability, minimizes downtime, and secures continuous service delivery without any security breaches along the way.

Smart Enterprise Architecture Can Overcome the Challenge of Business Continuity

The 21st century is a technological goldmine. You can use Gen AI to automate programming tasks, you can mix and match programming languages through ample use of APIs, and you can leverage cloud computing to balance resource use. Such an array of possibilities can make platform modernization seem like a formidable task. The different types of enterprise architecture offer a blueprint to make sense of so many choices and implementation strategies while setting the right course for change.