Application management services sounds intriguing; have a company host and run your applications, and separate your business from your infrastructure. Anyone who’s dealt with the stress of IT planning and purchasing understands the temptation to use application management.
Temptations aside, the question remains: is application management for you and your company? To help answer that key question, here are five good reasons to use it:
You Want To Save Money, Time Or Both
Application management is about saving two things that everyone wants more of – money and time. By trusting your applications and IT infrastructure to an application management team, you free up people to address other issues. With efficient professionals on the job who specialize in running your infrastructure, you get more for your dollar.
As noted by blogger Ann All, a lot of companies have legacy applications but aren’t sure they can get them to go away. A move to application management streamlines your IT world by putting it in the hands of people who streamline your systems efficiently.
You Need Specialists
Maintaining an IT infrastructure means employing many specialists – if you can find them (news out of the EU and Australia show you can’t always find what you need). You may not even need some specialists on staff full time, further complicating your plans. With application management, specialists are provided as part of the package. This is especially helpful in supporting engineering tools, where the internal IT department typically falters. This frees you up from needing a large IT team – or it frees up your IT team to focus on other issues.
You’re Facing A Lot of Change
The rate of change in the IT world is like something out of a science fiction novel. New applications, new features, decommissioned software, all have to be dealt with. Application management takes the fear of change out of the picture by having a knowledgeable person handle it for you.
Application management companies take care of change automatically or by request; they’re already prepared for the changes they know are coming.
You’ve Got To Measure Performance
Application management provides you with organization, coherence, and reliability – but it also provides you hard numbers. Application management can measure performance, storage, or most anything else you need. With these numbers you can make sure your applications are performing as needed, look for improvements, and see if goals are met.
You’re Ready For The Cloud
Cloud computing is what everyone is talking about – and with good reason. Despite it’s fad status, cloud computing means better service with less limits. Many application management services are moving to the cloud anyway because it fits their models – and you can reap the benefits.
The cloud presents its own challenges to application management, but its history of service oriented architecture and virtualization means the cloud has a strong foundation for application management, as noted by Jeff Caruso of Network World.
Is application management for everyone? No solution is one-size-fits-all:
• You may, for legal or other reasons, not be able to give your infrastructure to another company. But many application management service providers will manage environments in your internal data centers.
• You have a lot of highly specialized software developed in-house.
• You already need a large internal IT staff for other reasons.
If you’re not sure application management is for you, have an application management company do an estimate. If you are sure – have them do an estimate anyway. Good estimates let you measure the benefits – and the benefits of application management are considerable.
If you’re looking for more information, check out IT Business Edge’s Application Management section.
Application Management is about saving two things that everyone wants more of – money and time.By trusting your applications and IT infrastructure to an Application Management team, you free up people to address other issues.With efficient professionals on the job who specialize in running your infrastructure, you get more for your dollar.
