Blog
September 25, 2025
Enterprise web application development is no small undertaking. From meeting changing user demands, to safeguarding against new security threats, to balancing new feature development with long-term maintenance strategies, teams often face significant hurdles in creating functional applications that are reliable and ready for the future.
In this blog, I dive into enterprise web applications, including what makes them different from a standard web app and why PHP is a strong choice for their development. I cover use cases and backend architecture considerations, then outline a few best practices (and helpful resources) for teams beginning an enterprise web app development project.
Enterprise Web Applications: Overview
A standard web application refers to any app that has been designed to run in a web browser. In comparison, enterprise web applications serve a more specialized purpose. With that in mind and before we get into best practices, let's discuss what enterprise web applications are, how they're used, and why PHP is a popular option for developer teams.
What Is an Enterprise Web Application?
Enterprise web applications are any web applications run by a large-scale organization or business that delivers revenue or critical business value.
Enterprise Web Application Examples and Use Cases
When it comes to web applications, particularly enterprise web applications, customers demand instant gratification. They want to access what they want, when they want it. Your organization’s revenue and reputation are at risk if they can’t. This makes performance and availability critical when considering enterprise web app development.
Common enterprise web application examples include customer relationship management (CRM) software, content management systems (CMS), enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and more. Enterprise web apps can also serve industry specific needs:
- Healthcare relies on enterprise web applications to secure patient data
- Retailers use enterprise e-commerce platforms tied to inventory and logistics
- Financial and banking organizations rely on enterprise-grade risk management and trading tools for high-volume transactions
Reasons to Use PHP for Enterprise Web App Development
Chances are, your organization already incorporates PHP in their enterprise web application stack. Why? Because PHP powers some of the most popular CMS systems, ERP systems, and CRM software in use today. Additionally, you’ll see it in popular groupware platforms such as ownCloud and NextCloud, where it has allowed the products to adapt and expand to meet the varied needs of different enterprises.
PHP is a popular choice in these instances as the language offers impressive flexibility, scalability, and strong security features. Additionally, PHP has the capacity to accelerate developer work, provides continuous delivery of new features to drive your business, and is a cost-effective option to make the most of your available resources.
You’ll also find PHP in the API space. PHP was developed specifically for the web, and it can be extended easily to “speak” to different technologies (databases, web services, cache systems, and more). It natively understands XML and JSON, it’s often used as a glue layer to deliver APIs.
Another place you’ll find PHP in the enterprise is for internal facing tooling. These may be internal tools to provision licenses or entitlements, manage customer requests, or trigger backend processes such as financial transactions or record aggregation. With a rich number of frameworks and stellar tooling via third party libraries, PHP can help organizations build secure, scalable intranet applications.
Back to topMission-Critical PHP Made Possible
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Backend Architecture Considerations for Enterprise Web App Development
Choosing the right backend architecture is a foundational decision that can shape the scalability, performance, and maintainability of your enterprise web application. As businesses grow and user demands evolve, the architecture must support flexibility, resilience, and efficient development workflows. In this section, we’ll explore key architectural approaches and their implications for enterprise-scale solutions.
Monolithic vs. Microservices Architecture
When developing your enterprise web application, do you create a monolith, or microservices? Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. Neither approach is correct in 100% of use cases, so consider your application and business needs when you select an architecture.
| Monolithic Architecture | Microservices Architecture |
|---|---|
| You can share the same codebase, removing duplication of effort and logic | You can simplify development for individual teams; each can focus on their core features and business domain, and deliver them independently, faster. |
| You can potentially remove latency by reducing the number of API calls needed to assemble a response (you may still incur them via database and caching calls, however). | You can build in resilience; even if one part of the system is down, you can still at least return partial information. |
| You can simplify testing, as you can eliminate integration testing. | You can rewrite individual pieces in different technologies if PHP is not suited to the particular domain. |
Horizontal vs. Vertical Scaling
In enterprise web app development, PHP scalability is critical for ensuring that the system can handle growing user bases, transaction volumes, and data processing demands without compromising performance.
| Vertical Scaling | Horizontal Scaling |
|---|---|
| Focuses on upgrading existing hardware, adding more CPU, memory, or storage to a single server. | Involves adding more servers or nodes to distribute workloads. |
| Often simpler to implement and requires fewer architectural changes. | Ideal for enterprise environments where demand can fluctuate significantly or where high availability is essential. |
| Can reach a physical or cost-effective limit, making it less suitable for applications expected to handle exponential growth. | Particularly suited for applications built with microservices or containerized architectures, as services can scale independently based on real-time traffic. |
PHP, due to its shared nothing architecture, is very well suited for horizontal scaling.
Security and Compliance
Enterprise web applications often fall under regulatory compliance, particularly if they operate in the financial or health industries. This means having secure operating systems that are locked down to prevent tampering, having secure application runtimes that are proven to be free from common vulnerabilities and exploits (CVEs), highly regulated networking between services, and more. A security in-depth approach is warranted for enterprise web applications.
Back to topSecurity Solutions for Enterprise Web Applications
The average cost of a data breach reached nearly $5 million in 2024. Stay up to date on the latest CVEs and keep critical enterprise web applications secure with PHP LTS, consultative guidance, and Professional Services from Zend.
Enterprise Web App Development Best Practices
Successful enterprise web applications require more than just clean code and effective architecture. They also need strategic planning, comprehensive security protocols, and long-term maintainability. These best practices, while by no means exhaustive, can help you to get started on the road to better enterprise web app development.
Take a Security-First Approach
Start with secure environments from development onward: use hardened container images or cloud images that pass CIS Benchmarks, and follow established security guidelines for deployment. This means locking down what ports are accessible, on which networks, and reducing or eliminating the possibility of privilege escalation within your application or runtime.
Since you’ll be deploying a web application, follow the OWASP (Open Worldwide Application Security Project) Top Ten, and regularly review your application for these common security risks. If you are unsure how to mitigate a risk, consult a security expert.
Guard any secrets needed by your application, and use secure vaults with strong cryptography to communicate them to systems that need them.
PHP application security can often feel like a lot of hoops to jump through — right up until you suffer your first security exploit, and discover how much more costly that can be.
Implement Strong Documentation and Knowledge Management
IT professionals jump between roles roughly every two to three years. Your enterprise web application likely needs to stick around for five to seven, if not longer.
Documenting your system architecture and the libraries and applications your teams create is essential to ensure the long-term success of your applications. “We can do that later” only works as long as your developers are around; the moment they leave is when you’ll discover how much knowledge they carried around in their heads, unwritten.
Make documentation of your enterprise web app a priority from day one, including when and why specific architectural decisions were made.
Integrate Observability Tooling Into Enterprise Web Applications
How can you know what’s wrong with your application if you have no way to observe its health or diagnose issues?
Observability refers to application integrations that provide you metrics, logging, and, ideally, traces. Metrics allow you to know if systems are up or down, how much storage is being used, how saturated your network is, how long queries take, and more. Logging gives you insight into what users are requesting from your application, and can also provide information from the application itself such as when transactions are triggered, what users are requesting what data, and more. Traces give you full insight into everything that happens in a given request’s lifecycle, which can help you get to root causes of performance issues or bugs.
There are many SaaS providers of observability tooling, some commercial options such as ZendHQ for PHP enterprise web apps, and a wealth of OSS solutions that can give you full application observability. Investing time, effort, and money into observability will pay big dividends.
Utilize Container Technologies
One scourge of web applications is the phrase “works on my machine”.
Your developers should be developing against an environment that mimics the production environment. Your production environment should be repeatable and consistent.
Containers help you get to this state. Containers, when architected correctly, give you exactly that: repeatable, consistent environments. They help ensure that every developer is developing against the same environment, and provide an invaluable aid when horizontal scaling, as you can spin up low cost containers in microseconds to help expand your capacity.
Learn More About the Benefits of PHP Containers
Account for Long-Term Maintenance and Technology Lifecycle Planning
A good web application will provide business value that lasts for years. Most likely, your organization will continue iterating on it, adding new features, fixing bugs, and delivering new value regularly.
This means that you will need to consider the PHP lifecycle, and how it affects your application. You should consider the security of your application from the ground up, which means ensuring you are building on top of a secure OS version, using a currently maintained or LTS version of PHP, and up-to-date, secure PHP frameworks and libraries — relying on LTS versions of those as well if newer versions do not support your target PHP version.
This all takes time and effort, but it ensures the long-term security of your application. Planning for it now will help you save costs later.
Back to topFinal Thoughts
Enterprise web app development requires careful consideration of many, many moving pieces. If your developer resources are already stretched, or if you do not have in-house enterprise web expertise at your disposal, your best option may be to reach out to a trusted third party, such as Zend. Our global team of PHP experts provide valuable tools, guidance, and services built to help you develop effective enterprise web applications that are secure, scalable, and ready to withstand a changing ecosystem.
Make the Zend PHP Experts Your Experts
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Additional Resources
- On-Demand Webinar - Managing Mission-Critical Web App Migrations
- On-Demand Webinar - How to Secure, Scale, and Optimize Modern PHP
- Guide - How to Write PHP Extensions
- Blog - When to Use a PHP Application Server
- Blog - What's the Best PHP Framework for Web Development?
- Blog - PHP Hardening: Strategies to Meet Compliance Requirements