7 Signs You Need Application Managed Services—And Fast
Applications—from enterprise business applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft HCM, and SAP S/4HANA, to highly customized applications like proprietary content management, e-commerce and reporting systems—form the core of every organization. These applications are often responsible for revenue-generating processes, business operations and customer service strategies. In short, they are crucial to how companies run—and if these vital applications aren’t operating efficiently, neither are the outer layers of the business that rely on them.
But, maintaining the integrity and performance of mission-critical applications is no easy task. It’s often a complex, time-consuming and ongoing process—and there are a lot of applications to manage, too. In fact, research from the Cloud Security Alliance found that the average enterprise has 464 custom applications deployed—and this doesn’t even take into consideration the number of enterprise applications running.
Given the challenges that come with application management, more and more companies are turning to Application Managed Services (AMS) to offload many of these processes and tasks. In this blog post, we explain how AMS simplifies and streamlines application management—and the most common signs that it’s time to explore an AMS solution for your own business.
Breaking Down Application Managed Services
AMS removes the application management burden from your IT team by providing complete support for both enterprise and custom applications throughout their entire lifecycle—regardless of where they reside (e.g., on-premises, private cloud, public cloud, or hybrid cloud environment).
Navisite’s Application Services, for example, provide the proactive monitoring, system maintenance, customized reporting and 24/7 technical and functional support needed to ensure application environments are stable, secure and performing optimally. This ultimately empowers IT teams to focus more on strategic business priorities—not the day-to-day application maintenance tasks.
Business Triggers for Considering Application Managed Services
AMS is an ideal option for companies that lack the expertise, time or budget to handle application management in-house. While the decision to outsource application management varies for every organization, there are some situations that always present a compelling business case for these services. Here are seven of the most common business triggers:
1. Resource Gap
The IT skills shortage is real. According to research from McKinsey & Company, 87% of organizations admit they either are experiencing a talent gap now or expect to within a few years. Finding general IT professionals is difficult enough but finding those with unique expertise in both modern and legacy applications can be even more difficult. If you don’t have the right talent in-house and are having trouble finding the help you need to manage your applications, partnering with an AMS provider is a great option. A good AMS partner will serve as an extension of your team, providing you with the skillsets you need, whenever you need them. And, best of all, you don’t have to deal with the headache of finding, recruiting and retaining the right personnel.
2. Resource Turnover
When the people who created or maintained applications leave or retire from a company, the IT team loses the critical knowledge required to manage the application estate. This can be a big problem given the skills gap—and the fact that many custom applications are built on older technologies (COBOL code, for example) that aren’t being used by new coders. An AMS provider can provide the complementary expertise you need to keep things running smoothly despite staff vacancies. Additionally, if you want to modernize those legacy applications, a skilled AMS team can either rewrite them for a modern technology stack in the cloud or build new custom cloud-native applications.
3. Cost Reductions
A CIO.com article reports that companies using AMS “can yield a 25% to 45% cost reduction over staff augmentation in the first year alone,” with “many organizations seeing 50% to 75% savings after five years.” One of the main reasons for these big savings is that the AMS staffing model is inherently designed to lower costs. Rather than having to pay for a full-time application developer or IT professional, businesses leveraging AMS only pay for the skills they need, whenever they need them. Additionally, because AMS providers are responsible for delivering optimized systems and user experiences, customers benefit from reduced application total cost of ownership and a healthier bottom line.
4. Strategic vs. Reactive
Applications need to be managed, maintained and kept up to date with upgrades, regulation changes and new security processes. This places a heavy burden on internal teams to manage these applications and keep them up and running—taking time away from higher-value projects they could be working on to drive innovation and support the business. This reactive business strategy won’t give you what you need to differentiate in a highly competitive market. With AMS, however, you can move from a reactive to a strategic approach to IT by offloading the day-to-day administrative work and redeploying your in-house resources to focus on projects that move your business forward.
5. Application Backlogs
As your business grows, so does the number of applications required to keep it running. The workload capacity needed to manage and maintain this growing portfolio of applications can overwhelm the existing resources you have in-house, creating a backlog of work that needs to get done but always falls to the bottom of the priority list. A backlog that grows too big can eventually disrupt business processes and the user experience—and introduce a handful of security risks, too. An AMS partner can help you get out of these jams by offering the resources you need to quickly and cost-effectively complete the buildup of work and manage new and changing workloads.
6. Asset Consolidation
Remember that stat noting the average enterprise has 464 custom applications? Now imagine your company is going through a merger or acquisition, and that number doubles—but your IT team does not. Complicating matters, one company may be operating on-premises while the other has a cloud environment. AMS can help you create a new streamlined, optimized and modernized IT environment by consolidating applications, ramping up new ones and moving legacy applications to the cloud. Mergers and acquisitions are stressful enough—there’s no need to add the burden of application management to the mix.
7. Compliance Assurance
Keeping up with new and changing compliance requirements is difficult, especially if you’re in a regulated industry. Not only do you have to know which industry-specific mandates apply to your company, but you have to keep up with policy changes and put processes in place to continuously measure, track and report on compliance. This adds another to-do to your IT team’s large list of application management tasks. An AMS provider can help you meet compliance requirements by bringing the knowledge, solutions and support required to achieve your governance goals.
If any of these triggers sound familiar, it’s time you consider application managed services—and Navisite’s Application Services are designed to help you achieve next-level performance for your applications. Whether on-premises or in the cloud, our team will help you manage the entire application lifecycle, maximize the ROI of your enterprise applications and ensure they’re optimally powering your business. To learn more, contact us today.