MuleSoft Inc. is rolling out a major upgrade to its popular application connectivity service that takes aim at one of the most overlooked challenges in enterprise mobility: hooking up applications running on employee devices to the back-end infrastructure storing the data that they need for their work.

Manually integrating an aging on-premise system and a mobile client built years if not decades apart is immensely difficult due to the vast technical differences between the two, but that’s only the start of the problem. The more important part is exposing the information and capabilities from that mission-critical application in a way that doesn’t make it vulnerable to hackers but still leaves the user with enough flexibility to remain productive outside the office.

That is less of a challenge with the more modern cloud services that organizations are increasingly relying on for operational needs historically handled in-house, but it’s still a steep hill to climb. Enterprise developers not only need to strike the delicate balance between security and usability but also implement the integration such that it can adapt to rapidly evolving requirements as well as functional changes on both side of the application equation.

Added up across the thousands of applications and tens of thousands of employees found in the average enterprise, that becomes impossible to pull off perfectly, at least manually. MuleSoft offers to automate the process with the new version of its platform, which promises to take much of the effort – and human risk – involved in linking mobile applications to back-end systems.

The release brings with it a native security gateway that takes the burden of securing the connections between the different workloads off the developer’s shoulder. Besides freeing up a significant amount of time, that also avoids the rough edges that are often left behind from welding a third party component into the link, which simplifies maintenance while sealing off a potential attack vector for hackers.

Offering to further streamline the process is a new reporting mechanism for tracking key operational and usage metrics, improved interoperability between different kinds of software interfaces and support for more Microsoft services. The enhancements provide building blocks for creating integration temples that users will have the ability to share with one another another through the new exchange introduced as part of the update.

To set the ball rolling, MuleSoft is introducing 14 pre-assembled patterns for widely-used applications from SAP AG, Salesforce.com Inc. and other top enterprise software providers. The company hopes that enabling new use cases will broaden the appeal of its platform.

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