The benefits and best practices of an application network

In this section, we will review the benefits that application networks offer to an organization, and then we will highlight some best practices to follow when architecting your application network.

Benefits

Connecting and communicating in general have many benefits that are readily observable when looking at the flow of data across applications within an organization. Many of these benefits are quantitative as well as qualitative.

Improved efficiency and agility

When we began this chapter, we referred to the value of the WWW. It is an imperfect comparison to an organization’s application network and yet it highlights one of the greatest strengths (and, potentially, a serious weakness) of the application network.

So much data is available via the internet. But much of the best research I believe still comes from a good library and a solid collection of books, such as this one in your hands – material...