What is Low-Code Governance and Why is it Necessary?

What is low-code governance?

Low-code governance is a set of guardrails that ensure you are maximizing the value of the platform, and doing so securely, throughout the entire software development cycle.

Put another way, it’s the rules your organization has in place that allow citizen developers from across the organization to create apps that can contribute to your bottom line.

Why do enterprises need governance?

The nature of work is evolving. Citing their recent Digital Friction Survey, Gartner states that 49% of employees in organizations consider themselves technology end-users. But what about the employees who produce that technology?

• 5% reside in central IT departments
• 5% sit in business unit IT and data and analytics departments
• 41% of “employees who customize or build data technology solutions” can be found in business units and corporate functions.

Depending on the industry, the number of non-IT tech producers can range from 26%-54%. That’s a lot of shadow IT. And productivity-accelerating tools like low-code development platforms are being adopted at market-breaking levels.

However, the answer to this inevitability isn’t a governance framework with stricter policies, standards, and security procedures. That would only serve as risk mitigation.

There’s a reason why 41% of technology producers are out of IT. Those closest to the business know how they can create business value. Thus, governance needs to also be about ensuring that productivity and business value are fostered, not hampered.

We know low-code governance

This bears repeating: the right low-code platform lets everyone in your organization build business-strategy-aligned applications.

The right low-code platform will have tooling for app testing, deployment, and management, as well as application and platform governance. This ensures that there are standard processes behind app development and deployment, regardless of whether that build is happening in IT, or from the outside.

Tooling for testing, deployment, and management

Mendix offers a comprehensive suite of tools that give you the ability to perform testing across the entire software development lifecycle. The Application Test Suite (ATS) provides functional test automation. ATS also has a data-driven approach that enables non-functional tests like integration, process design, performance, and security testing.

Application and platform governance

Create with guardrails, not roadblocks. Mendix provides governance across the entire software development lifecycle. With the developer portal, users can collaborate from the project level to a very fine-grained, modeling level.

Control Center offers visibility into your application landscape so you can easily secure and manage. It gives you an overview of your application landscape, telling you which are active/inactive and who in your company is associated with that app. You can easily see and manage members and assign their roles and access credentials. You also get an overview of your cloud environment and its resource pack, failback options, and the appropriate technical contact.

Core to managing your brand, you can use Mendix’s out-of-the-box, customizable application templates, as well as utilize the Atlas UI framework that gives you a default design language that you can replace.

Manage and mitigate risk. Mendix supports identity and access management, two-factor authentication (2FA). Mendix also integrates with third-party identity management solutions, with support for AD, LDAP, OAuth, and SAML.

Developers can visually configure developer access control with 2FA and DTAP progressions, and any changes to security settings are traceable and managed.

Leaders of the pack

A lot of factors need to be considered when picking the right low-code platform. You need to consider the platform’s tooling capabilities for:

• Governance
• Testing
• Deploying
• Managing applications

Delivery and deployment tooling and governance capabilities are so vital to your success with a low-code development platform, that Forrester includes the categories in the Forrester Wave analyst report.