Architectural Services

architectural services

Architectural Services

Evolving multi-dimensional Software Architecture by applying the scientifically driven model to meet customers’ expectations

Our Expertise

System Architecture

Effective management of system capability is crucial for business success and sustenance of competitive advantage. System Architecture needs to maintain a balance across multiple factors viz. rapidly evolving technology, dynamic business scenarios, and integration with diverse systems, without increasing the cost of software development and the complexity of software systems.

System Architecture

Architectural thinking needs to be expressed effectively for addressing key business concerns such as the following:

  • Modernizing the hardware and software environments (reduce the complexity of IT infrastructure)
  • Increasing the portability of applications
  • Addressing the security challenges associated with the integration of multiple applications, devices, and data sources
  • Facilitating the system to communicate changes in a scenario or convey new ideas through multiple channels to the right stakeholders
  • Monitoring the capability usage of system features and resources

The practice of system development can provide benefits in terms of quality and cost gains by adherence to architectural guidelines. A key premise of this logic is that important decisions may be made early in system development in a manner similar to the development of civil architecture projects.

Our approach

To these ends, Spinacia Tech recommends an approach based on the generally accepted practices for architectural description and provides a technical framework for further evolution in this area.

Spinacia Tech initiates a criteria-based selection approach to describe how the system or product will be constructed; what the critical components would be; and their fitment from a high-level, logical perspective.

Mapping such a selection against the available templates helps to consider architecture principles for defining the system architecture, which addresses the visibility, changeability, and collaborative aspects to meet defined quality expectations of the customers.

Key activities

• Analysis of various system or product scenarios

    • Domain, industry practices, and statistics
    • Tools and technology usage
    • Costs and timelines
    • Learnings from a similar system

• Identification of key parameters before working on the architecture

  • Architectural principles applicable
  • Best practices to be followed
  • Quality of Service (QoS) to be achieved
  • Integration need
  • Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) product consideration

• Besides standard description, sections included in the output are

  • Behavioral facts or metrics of the existing environment along with the structural integration and operational behavior of an organization
  • How the concerns raised by various stakeholders are addressed along with the mapping metrics
  • The rationale behind the selection of architectural principles and tradeoff considerations
  • Metrics about the expected and targeted quality if architecture description is followed

Technology Roadmap

Organizations have always been challenging software systems to solve newer and more complex problems by pushing the boundaries of the existing technologies. It has been a perpetual race to implement better ways for facilitating operational efficiency, productivity, and save money through such competent software systems/products.

The impact that the ever-changing face of technology has on businesses, compels organizations to look at various business avenues for their growth and survival.

The importance of technological evolution is nicely summarized by Lehman’s laws of software evolution, which says:

  • Software systems must adapt to changes continuously or they progressively become less desirable.
  • As a system evolves, its complexity increases unless work is done to maintain or reduce it.
  • The quality of a software system will appear to be declining unless it is adapted for the changing business and technology environments.

To better prepare for the future, the impact of the changes in technology and markets needs to be assessed, not just in terms of potential threats, but also as opportunities.

For example, advancements in technologies such as big data and mobility have enabled organizations to process large volumes of data or scale their systems to billions of users, and provide services to users on mobile devices.

Technology roadmapping is a process of technology planning to achieve short-term and long-term business goals while adhering to the business vision. It is a structured methodology for exploring and planning relationships between evolving markets, products, and emerging technologies over time.

Technology Road mapping as a Service in Spinacia Tech

Our Technology Road mapping Service can help you fulfill all your technology-planning needs as applicable to your scenario.

As a part of Technology Road mapping, Spinacia Tech offers the following services:

  • Assessment and identification of critical focus areas such as products, support systems, and tools
  • Identification and definition of technology drivers in the focus area for which a roadmap will be prepared
  • Roadmapping
  • Technology solutions for identified targets
  • Identification of risks and show stoppers, and planning for an alternative methodology for those cases
  • Recommendations report on technologies and best practices for adoption
  • Adoption plan with information about probable milestones and checkpoints

NFR Consulting

Performance and Scalability Consulting

As businesses evolve, achieving and maintaining the desired performance becomes a challenge. The growing client base and data size degrade the application’s performance. Massive scaling needs and high performance under extreme load are becoming the most important common denominators.

In today’s business for large-scale companies, even a few milliseconds (ms) of degradation in performance adversely affects the revenue.

Studies have shown that “40 percent of shoppers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a retail or travel site”. A report by a leading e-commerce website states that “every 100-ms increase in the page load time decreased sales by 1 percent”, while a leading search engine website stated, “a 500-ms increase in the search results display time reduced revenue by 20 percent”. Hence, to meet the clients’ expectations and to stay ahead of the competition, performance and scalability have become the prime requirements of every business.

The conventional or historically known good architectures and technology stacks fail to meet the performance and scalability expectations of today’s business. The process of addressing performance and scalability issues becomes very challenging due to the rapid pace of technology evolution, increasingly diverse technology stacks, and complex deployment environments. Providing solutions to these needs under the constraints of existing technology choices, architectures, and investments calls for specialized performance and scalability engineering expertise, along with a deep knowledge of various use-case–specific technology stacks, middleware platforms, and compute alternatives.

Spinacia Tech Offerings

Spinacia Tech’s performance and scalability consulting services portfolio are designed to meet the unique multi-disciplinary needs of this problem domain.

Armed with expertise in performance testing, performance and scalability engineering, distributed computing, and emerging technologies, Spinacia Tech offers a comprehensive service portfolio to support the performance and scalability engineering needs of businesses.

The aforementioned services portfolio offers an assessment of the system, which includes:

• Performance and scalability assessment, which includes

  • Reviewing the existing system design, architecture, and behavior
  • Performance benchmarking of the system under various loads and interaction mix models and stress
  • Identification of the possible bottlenecks with root cause analysis

• Performance and scalability consulting, which includes

  • Architecting and designing solutions to meet performance and scalability goals
  • Remediation plan for bottlenecks identified during the assessment phase
  • Architectural suggestions for communication or integration, data model, and deployment.

Security Consulting

Software, including web applications and services, forms the backbone of business processes in today’s highly competitive business environment.

Web applications and services have enabled businesses to virtually reach out to their customers across the world. However, the World Wide Web is an unpoliced environment with many unscrupulous users who pose a security threat to business applications. A security breach can cause monetary losses and ruin the reputation of the business.

According to an article published on csoonline.com (The 15 Worst Data Security Breaches of the 21st Century), a Fortune 1000 company was attacked with an SQL Injection, resulting in the exposure of 134 million credit cards. In another related incident, 94 million credit cards were exposed through one American Apparel and Home Goods Company because of weak data encryption or weak network firewall configuration or both. Hackers generally exploit basic vulnerabilities that are ignored during development due to lack of awareness regarding security measures or the absence of a dedicated focus towards software security.

Software security, being spread across all the phases of the software development cycle (that is, Design, Development, Configuration, and Deployment), should be considered right at the beginning of the design and development phases. Unfortunately, in most cases, security is considered a post-development activity. As a result, any security breach detected at a later phase results in a costly impact on the overall development.

To safeguard a software application, one requires a thorough understanding of the space with continuous updates on new threats. Online communities dedicated to web application security, such as OWASP and SANS, regularly collect information about vulnerabilities and security attacks. Based on their assessment, the respective online community provides guidelines to safeguard applications against those vulnerabilities. An appropriate plan should be in place to adhere to these guidelines.

What Spinacia Tech has to offer

Spinacia Tech offers a highly reliable security service to clients, identifying potential vulnerabilities in their applications or products and safeguarding their applications’ critical data and business logic. Spinacia Tech helps clients to understand, analyze, and act on security vulnerabilities in the right context before an attacker exploits them.

The Spinacia Tech Security Practice follows industry-accepted processes, standards, compliances, and guidelines such as:

  • OWASP Top 10
  • SANS Top 25
  • PCI-DSS
  • HIPAA

Spinacia Tech also offers an assessment of the clients’ systems. The assessment covers:

  • Black Box Security
  • Application Security (White Box)
  • Infrastructure Security
  • Compliance-based Security

Based on the assessment and identified vulnerabilities, we provide a solution that includes:

  • Detailed risk analysis associated with the vulnerabilities identified in the application
  • Proposed solutions to identified risks and vulnerabilities; to be implemented during the Design, Coding, Deployment, and Configuration stages
  • Guidelines and best practices for coding and configuration to fix the identified vulnerabilities
  • Assistance in designing a secure infrastructure for hosting applications
  • Assistance in achieving security compliance

Spinacia Tech also provides consultancy in security solutions for various requirements such as Identity Management Service (IMS), SSO, and designing of Authentication and Authorization models.

Architecture Evaluation

Is your software architecture meeting the key business requirements of your stakeholders? Inability to evaluate the fitness of the chosen architectural strategies and standards can result in disaster.

Disaster that entails security goals falling, performance problems, customer dissatisfaction, barriers to scalability and availability, and systems that are too difficult to change or maintain.

Instead of assuming that the system architecture will work as expected for the anticipated business goals, why not prove it methodically?

Spinacia Tech offers

Spinacia Tech can help boost the confidence in your chosen architecture by executing robust methods for evaluating software architecture. Spinacia Tech is proficient in appraising the architecture, assessing its ability to meet non-functional requirements, detecting design errors, and identifying potential architecture risks to the project early on in the software development life cycle (SDLC).

Our methodology comprises of the following:

The scenario-based, standardized, architecture-centric evaluation process

  • We focus on revealing architectural risks that potentially hinder the attainment of business goals.
  • The architecture evaluation execution upshot
  • Improve communication and architectural understanding among stakeholders of the system and enable them to make informed decisions about architectural design or upgrade in the light of:
  • Clarified quality attribute requirements
  • Recorded data using a qualitative questioning technique
  • Improved architecture documentation
  • Based on the documentation of architectural design
  • Prioritization of conflicting quality goals
  • Identification of risks early on in the software development life cycle (SDLC)

The other terms in use for the evaluation of architectures are assessment, analysis, validation, and review.