A Complete Handbook for Outsourcing Enterprise Application Management with Confidence

Enterprise applications are integral to the management of modern business operations. Several businesses rely on these applications to simplify their operational workflow and tasks. Enterprise apps like customer relationship management, supply chain, and resource planning systems are equipped with custom functionalities. This enables businesses and teams to meet their operational requirements and improve overall productivity.

Businesses that work with enterprise apps should ensure optimal performance and security. Disregarding application performance and security optimization might lead to huge operational and compliance risks.

That’s why enterprises should prioritize continuous application maintenance and management. This approach involves consistent tracking, updating, and optimizing enterprise apps to ensure greater performance. By embracing a continuous maintenance approach, businesses can remove application vulnerabilities and improve overall user experience.

Challenges of In-House Application Maintenance

Businesses should consider integrating continuous maintenance into their IT strategy for future-proofing enterprise applications. However, delegating the responsibility of proactive enterprise app maintenance to in-house IT teams is inadvisable. Why?

IT teams are accountable for network management, application deployment, and helpdesk support. When continuous app maintenance is added to their workload, businesses risk increasing the possibility of IT team burnout. This burnout leads to slow response times for app maintenance issues, minimal focus on cybersecurity, and suboptimal performance optimization.

Other key challenges of in-house application maintenance include:

• Slow Troubleshooting – IT departments are well-versed in application development, deployment, and architectural concepts. However, when it comes to application management, several IT teams and workers opt for manual evaluation, audits, and maintenance. This leads to delays in troubleshooting security and performance issues and impacts application efficiency.
• High Maintenance Costs – When businesses opt for in-house application management, hiring and forming a team of IT talent is essential. Apart from team building, enterprises should invest in the purchase of security platforms and bug scanner tools. Maintenance team development and tooling support contribute to high operational costs for businesses.
• Compliance Risks – Continuous application maintenance necessitates structured compliance audits, encryption upgrades, and patch installation. When in-house teams rely on traditional tools and techniques for audits, identifying and mitigating data security vulnerabilities becomes difficult. This increases the risk of non-compliance and enterprise app data thefts and breaches.

Addressing these challenges becomes easier when businesses hire a dedicated maintenance team. That’s why outsourcing application management services is advisable.

Relevance of Outsourcing Application Maintenance and Management

Insight: As per a survey, the market for outsourcing application management services is expected to touch 41 million USD in 2025. The growth of outsourcing can be attributed to the rapid hiring of skilled maintenance professionals.

Outsourcing application management services helps businesses hire and build a team of dedicated maintenance experts. Dedicated application management experts are skilled in utilizing a range of automated tools and advanced methodologies for continuous maintenance. This enables them to monitor and optimize enterprise apps with minimal turnaround time.

With the support of dedicated application management teams, enterprises can overcome in-house maintenance challenges and experience:

• Proactive Security Management - Through continuous tracking, the dedicated app maintenance team ensures on-time security upgrades, troubleshooting, and patch installation. This minimizes security disruptions in enterprise apps and improves overall performance and user experience.
• Low Maintenance Expenses – By outsourcing application maintenance, businesses can reduce the expenses associated with hiring, training, and managing in-house maintenance teams.  Outsourcing firms offer dedicated teams access to essential tools for application maintenance. This eliminates the need for businesses to spend additional expenses on tooling and licensing.
• Compliance Optimization – Dedicated maintenance teams utilize automation tools during enterprise app optimization and management. With the help of automation tools, maintenance experts perform security bug evaluations, encryption, and compliance audits. This simplifies risk assessment and eliminates non-compliance risks.

Key Maintenance Practices Implemented by Application Management Experts

1. Security Patch Management

An effective approach to secure enterprise applications from cyberattacks is patch management. This involves identifying and fixing vulnerabilities in enterprise apps through security patch installation. The dedicated application maintenance team helps businesses with strategic patch management. Maintenance experts utilize automated scanning tools to search and identify vulnerabilities in applications’ codebases, network components, and databases. By collaborating with in-house IT experts, maintenance experts understand the severity of vulnerabilities found in enterprise applications.

Severity evaluation enables maintenance experts to identify and install the appropriate security patch to resolve vulnerabilities. To install the security patch, dedicated application management solutions providers utilize automated deployment tools. These tools minimize application logic and codebase disruptions during patch installation while eliminating vulnerabilities.

2. Performance Optimization

Major performance issues might arise when businesses scale the workload of enterprise applications. To balance the enterprise app scaling and performance, appropriate optimization measures need to be implemented. Dedicated app maintenance experts are skilled in enterprise application performance optimization. By utilizing application analytics tools, experts monitor the execution efficiency and identify performance issues. These tools scan and highlight performance issues like outdated codebases, slow database querying, and server response time.

App maintenance experts execute indexing techniques on the enterprise application’s database to improve querying speed. By configuring and implementing load balancers in the application’s server infrastructure, maintenance experts enable servers to distribute user request traffic and reduce response time. To resolve outdated codebase issues, maintenance experts collaborate with in-house development teams. This collaboration simplifies the implementation of code refactoring and modification processes and improves application performance.

3. Incident Management

When business teams utilize enterprise apps, they might encounter issues related to integration, performance, and downtime. These issues hinder team personnel from executing tasks on time, impacting workforce productivity. To overcome this, dedicated application management service providers set up a ticketing system. This system acts as a medium for collaboration between in-house business teams and the outsourced maintenance team. Through ticketing systems, internal teams can submit app security or performance incident requests to the maintenance team. This enables the maintenance team to notify and resolve key issues at the earliest.

Apart from incident resolution, the dedicated maintenance team helps businesses with incident lifecycle documentation. During the documentation process, maintenance experts record the incident sources, identification, and resolution approaches. This documentation approach simplifies the application compliance auditing and minimizes the risk of legal penalties.

4. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

The incorporation of encryption and bug fixing mechanisms in enterprise apps is essential to improve application integrity. However, deploying bug fixes and encryption mechanisms in applications through manual approaches is time-intensive for businesses. That’s why dedicated application maintenance experts utilize automated continuous integration and continuous deployment tools.

By leveraging automated CI and CD tools, maintenance experts test and analyze the integrity of bug fixes and encryption mechanisms. These tools offer insights into vulnerabilities in security improvement mechanisms. This enables maintenance experts to identify and remove vulnerabilities before deployment. CI and CD tools enable maintenance specialists to implement tested bug fixes and encryption in applications through a staged approach. This approach minimizes the codebase disruptions and ensures that the enterprise apps remain functional during the security mechanism implementation.

5. Data Recovery Management

Enterprise applications store data assets that are crucial to business management. These data assets are vulnerable to cybersecurity threats and losses. To eliminate the data loss scenario, application maintenance experts configure and set up data recovery mechanisms in enterprise applications. Data recovery mechanisms incorporated by maintenance experts include data backup and data replication tools.

By implementing data backup and replication tools, maintenance experts ensure that app data assets are frequently stored in a cloud server. Maintenance experts perform disaster scenario simulations on enterprise applications to test and modify the backup policies.

6. Cloud Infrastructure Management

Several businesses host their enterprise applications on cloud infrastructure. Though cloud infrastructure supports greater application uptime, it is essential to implement appropriate optimization measures to improve the application's hosting performance. Enterprise application management services providers have in-depth expertise in cloud infrastructure management. This enables them to devise and implement cloud infrastructure optimization measures and improve application performance.

For instance, to facilitate dynamic scaling in cloud enterprise applications, dedicated maintenance experts embed auto-scaling mechanisms. These mechanisms enable cloud enterprise apps to scale up or down their cloud resource consumption based on the actual workload. To secure data transfer in cloud enterprise applications, maintenance experts implement authentication mechanisms in the app’s APIs. By embedding OAuth and validation keys, maintenance experts ensure that the APIs of cloud enterprise apps protect data from tampering during transit.

Apart from scalability and security optimization, maintenance experts help businesses with cloud cost optimization. By utilizing auditing and analysis tools, maintenance experts identify and remove idle resources in cloud enterprise applications. This enables businesses to save cloud applications’ resource consumption costs.

Closing Thoughts

Continuous optimization of enterprise application’s security and performance is essential to maintain higher operational efficiency. However, for continuous optimization, partnering with reputable application management service providers is advisable. This partnership enables businesses to hire dedicated app maintenance experts skilled in continuous monitoring and optimization. By leveraging automated tools and advanced methodologies, experts speed up enterprise app security and performance optimization.

Apart from continuous monitoring, dedicated maintenance experts offer businesses training support. By organizing webinars and workshops, maintenance experts train business teams and the workforce on secure utilization and management of enterprise apps.