Many companies don’t realize how many of their applications from various departments are actually critical to ongoing business operations. Here’s how to find them and manage them most effectively.!
Author: Howard M. Cohen
When you hear the term “mission-critical application” what do you think of?
It’s likely you would describe large, wide-scoped applications that run the entire enterprise, like an ERP, with many core functions that serve a large group of users.
Mission-Critical is in the Eye of the Departments
Start with the most fundamental of business operations.
Just about every commercial company has a sales department, including manufacturing companies. If the company manufactures nothing, there is nothing for the sales department to sell, so the manufacturing applications are mission-critical to the sales department. Taken a step further, manufacturing companies have a materials procurement department to get them the raw materials they need to manufacture their products.
If that procurement department doesn’t procure anything, manufacturing can’t manufacture anything, and sales can’t sell anything. So, the procurement department applications are mission-critical. And procurement needs software to generate purchase orders, a fairly simple application that ends up being critical to everyone’s mission.
The bottom line is that processes need not be enormous to be enormously important. Many small, simple applications often end up being among the most mission-critical.
Time for a New Systems Analysis
Mission-critical applications require focused attention and deliberacy. They need to be properly prepared, carefully configure, intelligently integrated, and closely managed.
That said, the next thing we need to do is to re-examine all applications currently in use to clearly identify the dependencies between them, and the inter-departmental dependencies they create. Look carefully at each application from a functionality perspective, rather than simply size and scope. For each application, determine and document what other functions would be impacted were that application to fail or otherwise become unavailable.
You may be surprised to find that you have many more “mission-critical” applications than you ever surmised. But don’t be dismayed!
Mission-Critical is Our Specialty
By definition, mission-critical applications are critical to the ongoing operations of your enterprise. You can’t afford for them to be down or unavailable. They must be kept running at all times.
To ensure ongoing top performance you need expertise in running highly critical applications on Azure, the kind of expertise you find at Idenxt.
Idenxt combines highly sophisticated automation with extensive human expertise to deliver all the resources required to prepare and deploy those applications, get them running and keep them running at peak performance.
There are many business functions you have decided to assign to external resources because they maintain superior capability to perform those functions. Clearly, software that keeps your business running needs to be assigned to such resources.
No matter how small the application, if it must be kept running trust it to Idenxt. To learn more, contact us here.