Enterprise IT is complex, and an application that needs to be built for the enterprise will differ a lot from one that is built for a regular consumer. There are several factors that need to be kept in mind before developing an application for enterprise users. Let's take a look at what makes enterprise IT applications different from regular consumer offerings, as shown in the following list:

• Business oriented: Unlike an application that is built to solve the problems of individual users, an enterprise application is built to meet the specific needs of an organization. This requires the application to conform to the business practices of the organization, their rules, and the workflow they use.
• Robustness at scale: Most enterprises usually consist of thousands of employees who depend upon the internal applications to work and collaborate with each other. These kinds of use cases generate a large amount of data in various ways, and an application built for enterprise should be robust enough to handle thousands of users at the same time while also being able to crunch through a large amount of data that is distributed over a large network of nodes. During this time, the application should provide adequate mechanisms to deal with unexpected events that may happen for various reasons, such as attempts to breach security, the failure of nodes, power failure, and so on.
• Long-term support: An enterprise application needs to provide long-term support because enterprises usually don't want to move to newer applications as frequently as a regular consumer does. This happens because most enterprise applications are developed to integrate with the workflow of the organizations, and frequently changing an application will not only increase ownership costs for the enterprise, but will also cause a major disruption in the workflow for the employees of the organization.
• Ability to integrate: Most of the applications that are built for the enterprise won't be running as standalone applications. They will frequently need to interface with the other applications inside the organization. This gives rise to the need to provide a mechanism for easy integration of the application with others in the organization.