Software applications are critical components of today's enterprises and are directly involved in the processes of delivering services to consumers. But it does not end with developing custom applications. To ensure that these applications are still relevant to the business and to ensure they are still valuable to the business, organizations turned to application maintenance and support services. But what really involves these services?
The first question that comes to mind would be:
What is Application Maintenance and Support?
Application maintenance and support relate to the ongoing care and feeding of business applications after they have been implemented. It allows applications to run smoothly and evolve in response to changes in business needs over the time.
Maintenance tasks entail handling of bugs, implementation of updates, optimization, and usual check-ups not to produce malfunctions. Technical support activities of application maintenance and support services are more orientation towards the users and helping different employees using the applications.
Some key application maintenance and support activities include:
- Bug Fixing: In a nutshell, it may involve processes like code review and analysis, testing, and finding, diagnosing and resolving of software faults. This assists to increase the level of application stability and performance.
- Testing and Quality Assurance: Validating whether an application works optimally and meets user experience expectations where there have been changes that may affect it.
- Monitoring: Project or program work that requires constant monitoring of applications to check for issues likely to cause business interferences.
- Help Desk: To have dedicated teams for supporting users, solving their problems, and answering the questions of the employees.
- Reporting and Documentation: Documentation also assists in change tracking, maintenance, and future development of a certain software based on a specific detail.
- Regulatory Compliance: It includes changes made to implement new requirements and also those that are made to keep up with dynamic STATEMENT OF PROBLEM 13 regulatory and security requirements.
- Migration and Upgrades: Porting applications and moving them from one platform to another or updating them to newer versions of the technology.
Application Maintenance and Support: Its Relevance
Ongoing maintenance and support provides many advantages that make it indispensable for business-critical applications:
- Prevent Disruption: Preventive in a sense to ensure applications are running and if not, to address the problem before anyone notices.
- Enhance Security: Continual updates and security patches to fix and improve on any loops that hackers can use to infiltrate systems and cause havoc.
- Improved Performance: It also improves speed, response time and the capacity of the network to manage increased traffic.
- Lower Costs: Preventive care helps eliminate rather than fix problems as they arise in the later stages and hence helps to cut down on main repairs and reconstructions.
- Meet Evolving Needs: Anticipate future change and suitably modify applications to accommodate new processes, attributes and interfaces.
- Extended Lifespan: When applications are properly maintained, one can feel that the technology in it has matured hence does not require frequent overhauls.
- Better User Experience: Effective help desk and better UI brings in more productivity as well as satisfaction within the working population.
Selecting the Right Application Maintenance and Support Provider
As a result of the significant technical know-how and investment required to support complex custom enterprise applications solutions, most firms outsource their application maintenance and support requirements to third-party vendors such as Aress Software. Aress provides application maintenance and support services to support all stages of systems development life cycle. From conceptualization of solutions on standardized, innovative cloud computing architecture to managing the applications post their deployment.
Their synergy works towards realizing the optimum returns on cost investments towards the development of such custom solution. Having accrued vast experience across various domains and industries, Aress ensures that any application translates business objectives towards high performing, compliance and optimum costs. It also offers flexibility in delivery and also 24 x 7 coverage due to their global delivery model.
Conclusion
These forms of application maintenance and support are critical when it comes to realizing benefits out of software assets. This is why it is helpful to work with specialists such as Aress Software to reduce business risk. It helps organizations direct efforts and expendencies to business processes, not on applications' maintenance. If well maintained, applications transform into stable and growing secure environments that support market needs.
