Digital leaders are faced with an intense challenge to help businesses innovate, launch and scale new offerings / products / services at unprecedented speed. No-code platforms provide significant acceleration over traditional development methods through visual development, built-in enterprise features and DevOps capabilities.
It is easy to see why many enterprises and digital leaders are drawn to no-code development, however, it is important to understand the challenges and drawbacks that come along with it.
Let’s see what these challenges are:
1, Limited scope of innovation:
Since no-code platforms present a few templates to choose and design from, it somewhere hinders the concept of innovation. This changes the perspective from ‘What I want to’ to ‘What can I do’.
“If the business doesn’t have enough technical resources or wants to quickly try out a solution, then no-code development is a great answer. But when the company is into something which is away from the norm then no-code development is not really something the business should look at,” said.Manisha Raisinghani, Co-founder & CTO, LogiNext.
Aditi Kulkarni, Managing Director, Lead – Assets Strategy & Engineering Lead, Advanced Technology Centers in India, Accenture thinks that these templates could be treated as the building blocks. She feels that new templates can emerge from common use cases that are discovered during the course of software development.
“However, it is important to have clarity of the requirement at the beginning to identify the right template and avoid creating complex, costly and rigid products that can potentially wipe out the true benefits of a no-code platform,” she said.
2, Scalability and Flexibility
No code platform offers limited integration possibilities hence creates a challenge for scalability. Existing no-code/low-code BPM platforms lack the customization capabilities needed to handle their unique needs, resulting in half-baked applications that affect user adoption
Some no-code platforms started by offering industry specific capabilities, while others took an approach to offer reusable technology accelerators, which constrained their applicability across different segments of the enterprise.
“Selection of no-code platforms should be done through careful understanding of immediate and future needs of business and enterprises. As no-code platform vendors work towards maturing their offerings, their applicability will continue to evolve from building industry specific digital applications, back-office workflow intensive apps to more enterprise grade and scalable B2B/B2C applications,” said Mayank Rausaria, Partner, Deloitte India.
He also feels that scalability is not the only issue hindering the adoption of no/low code platforms.
“A winning technology strategy is a function of striking a balance between right technology platform choice, development methodology and alignment between business and technology teams to drive business outcomes,” he said.
3, Security
The business developers or the no-code developers may not have expertise on security and risks which trained developers or experience developers have. Reports and IT leaders have sometimes hinted at no-code being no-security platforms. When the consumers have expertise on security, the demand is that the platforms should build security into the products.
“Enterprise platforms need to support private cloud (or on-premise) implementations, with independent validation of the architecture from a security and privacy perspective. Being able to control data access over virtual private networks (VPNs), configurable firewalls, controlling data residency and encryption policies, and being able to scale the server storage and compute needs as required are some key requirements,” said Hardik P Gandhi, Co-founder & CEO, Zvolv.
Gandhi suggests that companies should Choose the right platform, evaluating speed of implementation, cost of ownership, customisation flexibility and security parameters to avoid any sort of vulnerability. He said that the ease of change management and driving user adoption needs to be a key criterion in selecting the right platform and implementation partner.
With no-code platforms changing and evolving with time some of these challenges are being addressed. Hence, IT leaders and analysts foresee for an enterprise to have a combination of open-stack and COTS solutions to coexist along with no-code platforms as one size does not fit all.
