Category: Managed Services

4 Questions That Matter for the Mobile App You Want the Most

Mobile apps are all the rage in the digital marketing world. At this moment, you are most likely rolling your eyes at such an obvious statement. But there’s a good reason apps have only increased in popularity. They help businesses make direct connections with their audience. There are mobile apps that help you do everything. You can manage your social media presence, book a hotel room, or even place an order at a restaurant. But how much do you actually know about mobile apps? Have you been pondering creating an app for your business? Is that the right call?

What Do We Know About Mobile Users?

Smartphones and tablets are seemingly everywhere. Since 2011, smartphone ownership has risen 35%. Now, 77% of the American population uses a smartphone. When it comes to apps, the numbers are intense. The average smartphone user has 80 apps downloaded on their phone and accesses at least 40 of them a month.

It is not too much of a stretch to say that Americans are tightly connected to their smartphones, as users spend about 3.5 hours a day on them. So, it looks like you have a ready-made audience for your mobile app idea. But hold on. There are a few questions you need to ask before you begin building your mobile app.

4 Critical Questions to Ask Before Building Your First Mobile App

At Atlantic BT, we’ve had the good fortune of working with clients in a wide variety of fields, helping solve both marketing and IT challenges. Lately, many of our conversations with clients have been focused on the creation of mobile apps. We’ve noticed several recurring questions needed to define the scope of the project. To help you develop the best app possible, and do it quickly and efficiently, we’ve gathered these insights for you.

1. Should You Build a Mobile App or a Mobile Friendly/Responsive Web Site?

Sometimes, you don’t need a mobile app. Instead, a mobile friendly version of your site (or a responsive website) will do just fine. Mobile friendly and responsive sites are great options if you simply want to optimize the display of your existing web content on mobile devices. By contrast, mobile apps work best for specific, targeted actions you want your audience to take (i.e. make a reservation at a local restaurant). Mobile apps also take advantage of functions on your phone, such as the GPS, camera, microphone, and more. Knowing what you want your users to accomplish is an important question to answer before you jump into building a mobile app.

2. Android, iOS, or Both?

For mobile apps, there are two leading platforms: iOS (Apple) and Android. In today’s mobile environment, you need to develop apps for both platforms. Only developing for iOS is a sure-fire way to tick off your Android audience. Then, you’ll be stuck saying over and over again “Yes, we are currently working on an Android version and hope to release it soon.”

3. What Will Your Users Do With the App?

The most successful mobile apps are focused on helping users solve a specific problem. Your app should be no different. Ask yourself what kinds of problems you want to solve for your users. Then build your app to solve that problem. Applications that attempt to do too many things are often not as well received as highly focused apps. A good user experience (UX) process will help you identify the core needs of your mobile app and ensure that those needs are addressed during the building process.

4. How Will You Update Content in Your Mobile App?

Mobile app development isn’t a one-time activity. You will need to keep your content up-to-date and make improvements in the app as the platforms grow and change. Build apps on open content management systems using technical frameworks that can adapt over time. Anything less puts you at risk for a dead app as conditions change.

Get Started with Mobile App Development

There are many factors to consider when creating a mobile app. At Atlantic BT, we’ve helped companies create innovative and engaging mobile apps that benefited both them and their customers. Our team of consultants, UX strategists, mobile developers and marketers will work with you to help you build the mobile app of your dreams.

August 24, 2018
4 Ways to Know If Your Site Is Safe for eCommerce

Congratulations! You’re ready to take a big step forward by jumping into eCommerce. You’ve evaluated the market to see how you stack up against the competition. You’ve developed your pricing strategies. You understand how you’re going to handle order fulfillment. And, most importantly, you’ve built out your website to handle all the online transactions.

But is your site really ready for eCommerce?

Four Questions to Ask Before You Begin eCommerce Transactions

1) Do you trust the work of your development partner?

Most eCommerce websites require significant custom development, so you can connect the site to your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software or integrate it with your marketing tools. This makes it essential that you can trust the company (or individual) that completed your development work. That means asking tough questions: Does your developer have the experience necessary to build sites that meet current standards? How reliable is the code? Has it been tested?

Because eCommerce asks a lot of your website, you need to feel confident your development partner is trustworthy and knowledgeable about security best practices. The long-term success of your business depends on it.

2) How secure is your hosting infrastructure?

Your eCommerce website needs to be in a stable, secure hosting environment. If you’re using a shared hosting environment, you may be at risk. If any website on that shared server gets hacked, your website and all your customer data (including credit cards and personal information) could be compromised.We recommend creating a customized hosting configuration in the Cloud.

As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner, we’ve seen first-hand the scalability and reliability that comes with hosting your website within the Cloud. And since eCommerce requires 24/7/365 operation, you need to minimize downtime as much as possible.

3) Are you using encryption to protect your data and transactions?

Today’s eCommerce websites handle more data and larger volumes of transactions than ever. Customers depend on you to keep their data safe and secure. Once you violate that trust, you may never get it back. This makes encryption essential. Installing Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption is a good starting point. TLS has replaced the older SSL encryption methodology. But has your developer taken the necessary steps to encrypt the transactions? What about the stored data? How about customer histories and personal information?

Failure to encrypt the personal information and transactional data stored in your site means that once a hacker gains access to your site’s backside, they have access to everything. By using trusted and proven encryption methodologies, you can keep your data safe, even if a hacker were to get inside the site.

4) Do you have a dedicated budget for website maintenance?

Many eCommerce projects tend to focus on the task of developing and launching the eCommerce site. However, websites and hosting environments are a lot like buildings—if you don’t maintain them, they will break down over time.

At a minimum, you will need to plan on updating your website’s core code, the encryption technologies, the integration with your external systems, and the structure of the hosting environment. A dedicated maintenance budget will help you extend the life of your eCommerce website and provide the peace of mind your customers need.

Launch with Security, Launch with Confidence

A secure foundation for your new eCommerce store will relieve any worries in the back of your mind. If the questions asked above have you concerned that your online store might not be ready, my colleagues in eCommerce will be happy to set you at ease.

August 21, 2018

Who is the Winner of the Great Content Delivery Network Race?

The Internet has more than its share of misconceptions and half-truths. However, one of the most significant mistakes is the belief that bandwidth speed alone determines how fast a webpage will load. The truth is more complicated—your website’s load time depends on user bandwidth and the latency of your server.

You can’t control the quality of your user’s Internet connection. However, there is a proven way to improve the latency of your server by using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDNs support your site by storing and caching your content (such as images, CSS, videos, and the like) and serving this content from an EDGE location. The result? Your webpage and all its content loads faster and more reliably.

This leads to the natural question: which CDN delivers the right combination of value, reliability and performance? To learn the answer, I designed and conducted a series of tests measuring the speed and performance of four CDNs: S3, CloudFront, Fastly, and section.io.

How I Tested These CDNs

I created my test to simulate a typical loading task for a website facing low to modest traffic. Using an S3 server, I pushed a 100kb file and tested how many transactions the CDN could handle over a period of 90 seconds with 100 concurrent connections on a single 300mb/second link; I also measured the CDN’s transfer rate and response time.

The table below reveals my test results, but first, a few qualifications:

I chose S3 as the test server because of my experience with S3 as well as S3’s support from Amazon Web Services.
I chose these four CDNs because of their similar price point and my familiarity with them.
There was no “warming” of the cache by throwing a preliminary file at it to scale the cache upward. This allowed the test to better simulate a site with modest traffic experiencing a sudden rush of visitors.
My test did not include comparisons between the different CDNs’ features, such as the ability to invalidate a CSS file or security capabilities.

CDN Performance Results and Observations

	S3	CloudFront	Fastly	section.io
Transactions	7533 hits	12456 hits	12131 hits	12284 hits
Availability	100%	99.14%	99.34%	99.51%
Elapsed Time	90.03 sec.	89.95 sec	89.81 sec	89.47
Data Transferred	735.64 MB	1216.41 MB	1184.67 MB	1199.61 MB
Response Time	0.95 sec	0.33 sec	0.37 sec	0.39 sec
Transaction Rate	83.67 trans/sec.	138.48 trans/sec	135.07 trans/sec	137.3 trans/sec
Throughput	8.17 MB/sec	13.52 MB/sec	13.19 MB/sec	13.41 MB/sec
Concurrency	79.1	45.05	49.74	52.9
Successful Transactions	7533	12456	12131	12284
Failed Transactions	0	108	80	60
Longest Transactions	9.04	31.15	31.21	31.27
Shortest Transactions	0.12	0.05	0.1	0.17

Amazon CloudFront emerged as the clear frontrunner, leading the pack in transactions processed, data transferred, response time, and speed. CloudFront also led the way in failed transactions, though the 108 failures represent less than 1% of transactions attempted.

That said, these results represent only one test in one set of circumstances. It’s important to try out different CDNs for yourself to find the combination of performance, features, and price that best fits your needs. If you have specific questions regarding CDNs or Amazon Cloud Services, our development team is here for you.

August 3, 2018

How to Grant Transparency on Amazon Web Services

When you start working with an Amazon Web Services partner, transparency is important. On the one hand, these cloud experts need to have a good deal of information to do their best work on your AWS environment. On the other hand, you need to know you can trust these AWS engineers with your sensitive information and processes. This kind of trust and transparency is tough while you and your potential partner are negotiating the business relationship. And before a contract has been signed. That’s why it’s important to know how to grant read-only access on AWS.

Why Read-Only AWS Access Is Important

Read-only access in an AWS environment is useful for when someone needs to look into your cloud environment WITHOUT being able to change anything. This way an AWS vendor can view a potential client’s setup and existing AWS applications before signing a contract and committing to helping them with AWS environments.

In addition, often the business users who negotiate a new AWS partner relationship aren’t as well-versed in the specific needs of their own system (unlike their IT team). By granting read-only access for a potential new vendor, business users can get a better sense of what their AWS needs are and what kind of environment will work best for their business. If you want to handle technical debt (things that your system is doing/running that you aren’t aware of), providing this kind of visibility is helpful for your vendor relationship to begin with the right kind of understanding and transparency.

While AWS has extensive documentation about sharing views of an AWS environment, these descriptions can be intimidating to less technical users. What follows is a step-by-step guide for how to grant read-only access to your AWS account.

GUIDE: How to Create Read-Only Access on AWS

From the main console screen, type in IAM. And select the suggested link.

From the IAM dashboard select the Users section and then Add user button.

Enter the new username for your read-only user (ABT_ReadOnly in this example), select the Programmatic access and AWS Management Console Access. Then select Next: Permissions.

Select the Attach existing policies directly button, then use the search bar to search for ReadOnlyAccess policy. Select the check box beside that policy. Then select Next: Review.
*NOTE: it’s imperative that you select Read Only Access Policy and set the right permissions. Otherwise you’ll grant too much control to your potential new party.

Select Create user.

On this screen, you will need to share the following credentials with your new user: the access key id, the secret access key (select the show option), and the password (select the show option)

You can also download the keys with the download .csv button and provide that csv with the password to your AWS vendor. Your AWS vendor will also need the link shown in the green window where it says “Users with AWS Management Console access can sign-in at:___________ “. This link will allow your new user to sign in.

If any of these steps have you stuck, or if you’d like to ask questions about AWS user privileges, my team will be glad to help. Please reach out to us on the ABT contact form, or take a closer look at our AWS services page.

July 2, 2018
The Myth of the Full-Stack Unicorn Developer

Recently, one of our long-term clients asked me to review a job posting they were struggling to fill. The client wanted a senior software application engineer. But not just any senior software application engineer. A “true full-stack developer” experienced in back-end development, front-end development, and architecting cloud environments and web infrastructure.

Before the client asked my thoughts on this potential hire’s compensation package or how to find them, he led with the most important question: “Are we looking for a unicorn?” Unfortunately for our client, I answered yes.

The Problem with Unicorns

For developers, the word “unicorn” refers to someone with such a diverse range of skills that they’re incredibly rare. For example, an expert programmer who is also an ace visual designer. While such a person may be out there somewhere, they will be so hard to hire that they might as well be imaginary.

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Here’s how a successful unicorn hunt would go. First, you have to find them and make sure that the skills they mentioned on their LinkedIn profile are more than just words. Second, you’d need to hire them away from wherever they were currently working. Unicorns are rare, so companies will work hard to keep them. Third, you need to be willing to pay the high salaries these experts can demand. The result is a long time spent on a hiring process to acquire one person at a very high price. This is assuming he or she is exactly what you need, will fit in with your team, and won’t be headhunted away at a critical time in your project.

In our client’s case, it’s not that it’s impossible to hire someone who knows back-end development, front-end development, and cloud environments. It’s just practically impossible to hire someone who is good at all these things. The challenge is that historically in our industry, these roles have been very segmented.

A Short History of Web Development

How did this segmentation happen? The answer requires a little walk through web development history.

The front-end of a website is comprised of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. All three have matured over the decades. But JavaScript in particular has seen a recent explosion of libraries and frameworks built on top of it. These technologies have introduced back-end programming concepts to the language that cause the work between front- and back-end development to overlap.

Web development today offers a lot of frameworks. This makes it easier to imagine a full-stack developer who can do everything.

For example, languages like TypeScript have introduced class-based object-oriented programming fundamentals to JavaScript. This makes JavaScript feel more like a back-end language. Frameworks like AngularJS, Backbone.js, etc. have introduced MVC and similar patterns into JavaScript. And technologies like Node.js have introduced server-side JavaScript.

The result is a traditional front-end developer now having skills and knowledge relevant to back-end programming. And conversely, a strong back-end developer will find some familiar concepts in current JavaScript libraries and frameworks. These multi-disciplinary programmers often refer to themselves as full-stack developers.

Why Finding a Good Full-Stack Developer Is Hard

So if these two divergent worlds are now more similar, then why is it difficult to find a “full stack” developer? There are two reasons. First, development is a constantly evolving and expanding field that makes dual mastery really tough. Secondly, that the “stack” now includes more than just front- and back-end programming.

Deceptive Duality

Despite the newfound overlap between back- and front-end programming, both sides of the spectrum are constantly evolving. In short, just because someone can do both doesn’t mean that they will be good at both. It also doesn’t mean that they will be able to stay current in both. With the recent explosion of JavaScript related languages, libraries, and frameworks, there is more to learn than ever. Keeping up with that while also staying current in back-end languages, libraries, and frameworks can be time-consuming and difficult.

Too Many Hats to Wear

The “stack” is more than just front- and back-end programming. Hosting infrastructure and cloud architecture is a different area altogether. A true full-stack developer also needs to know another set of programming in order to architect a cloud environment to host new applications. Essentially, a network hosting engineer. This means writing scripts to set up servers, ensuring the code is secure, and handling other aspects of deployment for every update. And don’t forget about QA. The full stack developer also needs to be able to design and run their own automated tests to ensure their code works well in the designated environment.

In short, I told our client their job posting needed major revisions. Sure, they were likely to find applicants who consider themselves “full stack” developers. But their skills would severely lack in the hosting/infrastructure/cloud architecture department. Our client would also find people who say they have a background in both front and back end technologies, only to discover that they’re significantly more skilled in one because they’ve done it longer than the other.

Why a Good Team Is Better than Hunting for Unicorns

You can probably guess what I advised our client to do next—split this role into two separate positions. The first would be someone who knows back-end and front-end programming. They would also ideally know something about testing automation. The second would be someone who knows the hosting/infrastructure/cloud side.

A strong team of developers will always have advantages over one full-stack unicorn. Assuming you can even find one.

This client’s big goal should be to foster a DevOps culture where these two people are working together, instead of hoping for one person to do everything. By relying on a smart team who knows how to share workloads and collaborate, our client would be able to tackle all the tasks they wanted this unicorn to do. They’d enjoy more flexibility in how they respond to changing project needs.

Building a team also means you can hire and nurture true experts who are working on mastering the skills you need. Letting your programmers focus on the latest tools, frameworks, and techniques in their chosen field means they won’t dilute their skills by having to divide their attention across programming disciplines. This also protects your programmers from getting burnt out from extra pressure to perform completely different tasks on a project.

If you’d like our input on how to find the right team for a development project, or if you’re looking for a partner to ramp up development resources, feel free to contact us anytime.

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May 31, 2018
Why It’s Empowering to be a Proud AWS Public Partner

At Atlantic BT, we are dedicated to delighting our clients. It’s one of my favorite things about working here. This is more than just playing with a turnkey tool or service. We want every website, application, and hosting solution to make our clients’ lives easier. ABT is proud to be an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Sector Partner. This distinction fits perfectly into our philosophy of delight for our government clients.

AWS GovCloud and Public Partnership

AWS provides cloud-based hosting and infrastructure for all kinds of organizations. GovCloud is their AWS region designed specifically for US government agencies on the local, state, and federal level. Because these government agencies have unique compliance and security requirements, GovCloud makes it easier to tailor cloud environments to meet these rules. In addition, AWS GovCloud was the first FedRAMP cloud. This means that Amazon has been leading in this space as long as the space has existed. There is no cloud provider safer and better than Amazon Web Services.

As cities and states prepare to become “smart” and already smart cities/states become smarter, consuming services in cloud environments like AWS is inevitable. AWS Public Sector Partners are Amazon’s certified vendors to set up and customize their cloud environments for government agencies and organizations. Earning this certification takes AWS experience and expertise. ABT is proud to be a part of this group of vendors. This recognition shows our commitment to helping all government entities make safe, sound decisions.

GovCloud adds flexibility for government agencies to engage with AWS terms of service. This is extremely important. While private companies are not allowed to deviate from any AWS terms, GovCloud permits public agencies to adjust pricing to best fit their budgets. It also has essential compliance and security rules built into its system. This ensures that public agencies keep sensitive information safe.

Enter Atlantic BT, AWS Public Partner

Being an AWS Public Partner gives ABT that same flexibility. We can work with the pricing and architecture needs of any public agency. Then we can deliver the best possible cloud environment for their needs. We also have five AWS-certified experts who architect cloud environments for private organizations, like Mutual Drug. This allows us to share private sector experience with our public sector clients. We can fine-tune their cloud environments with better functionality and performance. We’re already doing this work in our ongoing projects with NC government and look forward to more opportunities going forward.

How did we get here? It’s tempting to chalk up this success to simply choosing the right technology and capabilities to master, then applying these solutions to every opportunity that comes along. But the truth is, we got here because of the effectiveness and empathy of our team. How they creatively approach problems while collaborating with clients matters. To really delight clients, you need more than intelligence and expertise. You need a spirit of cooperation that listens closely to a client’s unique situation. That is the inspiration to design an inclusive process to craft, test, and optimize technology. The result makes everyone take joy in their new solution.

When it comes to technology and our capabilities, we’re essentially unlimited. I don’t say that to brag, but rather emphasize that any competitive cloud provider could learn to use AWS well. Cloud capabilities will continue to change as new tech comes out. It’s the processes and people here at ABT that make me really proud—and excited— about what we have to offer for public sector agencies. We’re happy to introduce them to the cloud.

March 29, 2018