The sheer amount of applications that organizations of all sizes have to manage is staggering. For enterprises alone, that number can rise into the thousands.
The enormity of combating this task can be a drain on IT resources. Instead of putting their efforts towards growing your business, your IT team is bogged down by the requirement to manage these apps.
To tackle this problem, IT decision makers are adopting managed software solutions. And for business application management specifically, that means turning to Application Managed Services (AMS).
What are Application Managed Services?
AMS is a solution wherein your business applications are monitored and maintained by a managed service provider for a subscription-based fee. Regardless of the size of your organization, leveraging AMS means delegating the responsibility of these tasks to a trusted third party.
To help decide if this solution is the right fit for your company, we’ve outlined the advantages and disadvantages of adopting AMS.
Advantages of Application Managed Services
Access to the Skills Pool
Every year, the biggest concern of CIOs is their ability to retain or hire IT talent. To manage all of your various critical business applications, you need to hire multiple people to cover the different programming languages that are used and the different platforms that need to be maintained.
You will not have to worry about the makeup of your internal IT team with AMS. Your managed service provider will have access to the best specialists that suit your exact business needs.
This is an enormous cost advantage, as you will no longer have to spend the time searching for various hard-to-find IT skill sets, removing all the costs that come with the hiring, training, and talent retaining processes.
AMS Allows You to Focus on Your Business
Because your AMS service provider proactively monitors and maintains your applications, they will handle day-to-day tasks like bug-fixes and patches, as well as anything that could disrupt business processes. On top of that, if you work with a managed service provider with infrastructure specialists they’ll simultaneously analyze your network to ensure it’s operating at peak performance for your application needs.
This frees up your in-house IT team to focus on what they do best – focusing on technology solutions that enable growing your business. Remember that project you’ve been talking about for years but have never had the time to work on? With AMS, now you do.
Get an Honest Opinion On Which Of Your Business Apps Need Support
Gain Effortless Scalability
As a business leader, your main objective is to grow your business. And what better solution that one that grows alongside your business? AMS solutions are scalable.
This means that as your business grows and you add more employees, your managed services partner can add capacity, and purchase extra software/application licenses on your behalf. Your AMS managed service provider can work with you to adjust your contract as required to suit your exact needs.
Likewise, your AMS can be scaled down if your organization sees various seasonal increases in usage, followed by decreases in usage, or you divest in a portion of your business.
Receive New Insights Into Your Business
As mentioned, your AMS provider will staff the very best specialists with an array of app development and management skills that will be able to provide a new point of view into your business operations based on the support metrics that are collected.
Not only will you not have to worry about the management of your business applications, but with this new visibility into your organization and how it operates, you’ll receive recommendations and improvements based on assessments in ways that you may not have considered before.
Secure Your Mission-Critical Business Applications
You want to avoid the nightmare that comes with any downtime for your business applications. If you are the IT manager of a bank, you cannot afford to have your mobile banking app go offline.
Not only do security risks or downtime impact your organization’s brand, but they carry a hefty financial cost. Fortune 1000 enterprises, for example, can expect as much as an 8% loss of revenue due to IT downtime.
Look for an AMS provider that also has security experts on staff. That way all your security and compliance concerns around your business applications are put into the hands of your trusted partner. You can rest easy with the understanding that your business apps are monitored and protected.
Disadvantages of Application Managed Services
There is no such thing as a perfect solution. While few and far between, there are situations in which AMS is not the right choice for your organization.
Is the Cost of AMS Worth It?
Ultimately, as a business leader, you must look at the costs required to operate your business. For some companies, your apps may be slowly failing and overall application efficiency is trending down, but it’s not necessarily tearing down your business.
You have to decide if your faulty applications are affecting your customers and clients to the extent that you want to pay for AMS. This is the balance you must find.
After all, maybe you only need support for some applications and not others, and then decide to build your AMS contract specifically around those mission critical apps.
Tips to Address: Low-Support Cloud Applications
Perhaps your best bet, in this situation, is to find an out-of-the-box cloud solution that requires less integrations and customization, and most importantly, little to no support.
Learn More About Application Managed Services:
- Should You Outsource Application Management Services?
- How to Improve Legacy and Business Applications without Expensive Modernization
AMS Does Not Equal Vendor Management
Not every AMS provider is created equal. Depending on the range of services provider by your managed services provider, you may be looking for additional services around your business applications that the managed service provider you are looking into does not offer.
Nearly 9 out of 10 businesses end up leveraging their current third-party partner for additional services. Remember, one of the advantages of AMS is the insight that can be gained from third-party experts gaining visibility into your business operations, so you’ll want to take advantage of your AMS provider to the fullest extent.
Resolute offers a full suite of Application Management Services designed to ensure you get maximum capability from your IT. Book a 30 minute FREE consultation with one of our senior IT consultants and gain unparalleled guidance on how to take your IT to the next level.
