You will need application maintenance services to keep your deployed software reliable, secure, and up-to-date. These services include bug fixes, performance improvements, system upgrades, and adaptation to business needs. It doesn’t matter what you do: Running legacy systems or modern cloud-based applications, with ongoing software maintenance, you can expect stability and reduced downtime.
Content:
- What makes AMS essential?
- What services does application maintenance include?
- The AMS process and best practices
- Challenges in AMS and ways to overcome them with outstaffing
Are you a product owner or a startup founder who wants to extend the life of your applications without overloading your in-house teams? This piece may be useful to you.
What makes AMS essential?
Managed application services are not only bug fixes. Being a strategic investment in your software’s longevity and your team’s efficiency, they are the backbone of business operations. Companies that adopt a proactive AMS model are better equipped to adapt, scale as well as stay competitive, secure, and efficient.
Here are 10 reasons why AMS matters:
1. Ensures business continuity
IT downtime is more expensive than ever. According to several 2024 studies, the average cost of an unplanned outage is over $14K per minute, which is nearly 10% higher than in 2022. On top of that, over 90% of mid-sized and large companies lose more than $300,000 for every hour of downtime.
Application maintenance and support help prevent these costly disruptions. They keep your business running smoothly and protect your revenue and reputation.
2. Optimizes performance and reliability
Even well-built applications degrade over time. The Application Acceleration Manager identifies and resolves bottlenecks, memory leaks, and performance drags. Proactive tuning ensures that apps run efficiently and consistently, which is critical for high-traffic platforms like e-commerce and fintech.
3. Enhances security and compliance
Cyberattacks are constant. A University of Maryland study (eng.umd.edu) observed that public-facing systems are targeted every 39 seconds, which adds up to over 2,200 attacks per day. Web application maintenance offers continuous monitoring and regular security updates to help prevent breaches and ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA.
4. Extends application lifespan and maximizes ROI
If you only fix software after something breaks (called reactive maintenance), it can make your IT costs go up by as much as 50%, according to Gartner. That means you’ll spend much more on emergency fixes, downtime, and technical debt.
Instead, with a proactive approach, your cost of application maintenance can be much lower, and what’s more, you can extend the life of your application, so you get more out of what you already paid to build.
5. Improves UX
Today’s users expect websites and apps to work quickly and smoothly. If an application is slow, crashes, or doesn’t work properly, people are likely to leave and not come back. In fact, studies show that 88% of users are less likely to return after a bad experience. IT application support keeps your software stable and responsive, which leads to higher user satisfaction and stronger customer loyalty.
6. Reduces the total cost of ownership
Preventive maintenance is significantly more cost-effective than dealing with emergencies. According to some data, the cost of reactive fixes and downtime can be up to five times higher than that of ongoing managed care.
7. Facilitates innovation and business agility
App maintenance supports the smooth integration of new features, third-party APIs, and emerging technologies. This helps companies to innovate without worries about stability or compatibility issues.
8. Frees up internal resources
When you let an external AMS partner handle routine updates, do application performance monitoring, and cover support, you help your in-house team focus on high-value strategic initiatives (instead of constant firefighting).
9. Supports scalability
As your business grows, AMS helps scale your applications without performance issues. Whether it’s adding more users, expanding to new markets, or integrating cloud-native capabilities, a managed team ensures your software evolves with the business needs.
10. Delivers 24/7 application support
AMS teams can provide round-the-clock monitoring and response, which is crucial for global companies or platforms with users in multiple time zones. The secret here is to hire a globally distributed team with a reliable staff augmentation vendor.
What services does application maintenance include?
AMS is a set of ongoing services that keep your software stable, secure, up-to-date, and ready to adapt. What exactly is included in the AMS?
- Corrective maintenance. This is about identifying and fixing problems that show up after your app is live, like errors, crashes, or performance issues. It ensures the app continues to work as expected.
- Adaptive maintenance. Adaptive maintenance updates your app to work with new operating systems, browsers, hardware, or third-party tools. For example, when iOS releases a new version or an API changes, your app needs to be adjusted.
- Perfective maintenance. These are application enhancement services that improve your app based on user feedback or changing needs. It can include polishing the user interface, adding small features, or optimizing code to improve speed and usability.
- Preventive maintenance. Here, the focus is on preventing issues before they happen. It includes regular system checks, code refactoring, performance reviews, and security audits to keep your app healthy in the long term.
- Security patches and updates. Cybersecurity is way too important. Regular updates help close security gaps, patch known vulnerabilities, and protect user data by following current best practices.
- Performance monitoring and optimization. Your app’s performance is constantly tracked from how fast it loads to how often errors occur. Based on this data, improvements are made to keep it running under various conditions.
- Database maintenance. This covers tasks like optimizing database queries, backing up data, and ensuring it can be recovered in case of an issue. A well-maintained database keeps your app responsive and reliable.
- Documentation and knowledge transfer. As the app evolves, it’s important to keep documentation up to date for future developers, new team members, or anyone taking over the project.
- User support and troubleshooting. When users have problems or questions, technical support teams help solve them. This includes responding to tickets, investigating issues, and ensuring users get the help they need.
So, now you think you need one? Check out the processes you’re going to face:
The AMS process and best practices
At first glance, these elements in the AMS process can feel like a mix of disconnected practices: SLAs, automation, skilled teams, predictive analytics… But in a well-structured AMS framework, they actually form a consequential and interdependent system. Here’s the core logic behind the AMS process:
- SLAs set the standards. They define what’s expected: How quickly issues should be resolved, how reliable systems should be, and what metrics define “healthy.” Everything else in the AMS process exists to deliver on these promises.
- To meet SLAs, you can’t just react to problems; you need proactive monitoring. This ensures that potential breaches of SLA thresholds (like system slowdowns or downtimes) are identified and addressed early.
- But identifying issues is only part of the equation. You need a robust incident management system to triage and resolve them in a way that’s traceable and accountable.
- Regular audits and reviews feed into both monitoring and ticket resolution. They help you catch patterns, detect technical debt, and find systemic vulnerabilities before they lead to SLA breaches or user complaints.
- Change management is the safeguard that allows you to improve or patch your system without breaking something else. It creates continuity and reduces the chaos that can derail performance metrics.
- Throughout this process, communication and reporting keeps stakeholders aligned and informed. If monitoring detects an issue or change management schedules downtime, your users and teams need to know. This reinforces transparency and trust.
- Now, skilled teams are the human engine behind every one of these components. SLAs, monitoring, audits, automation… none of these work without qualified people interpreting data, making decisions, and managing complexity.
- To support these people and reduce repetitive work, we use automation and AI. These enhance capacity, accelerate diagnostics, and improve proactive monitoring. Automation is not a separate layer but an amplifier for every part of the AMS cycle.
- Finally, predictive analytics acts as the strategic capstone. It takes all the data generated from monitoring, ticketing, audits, and incident history, and uses it to forecast problems and prioritize long-term improvements. This feeds back into proactive efforts, closing the loop.
All these elements are consequential, but only if treated as an integrated system. If you implement them as isolated practices, you get scattered effort and weak results. But when aligned properly, they form a tight feedback loop that:
- Sets expectations (SLAs),
- Monitors performance (monitoring),
- Responds effectively (ticketing),
- Continuously improves (audits, change management),
- Communicates (reporting),
- Scales (automation, AI),
- And evolves (predictive analytics).
Challenges in AMS and ways to overcome them with outstaffing
Alas, legacy application maintenance is not without challenges. Here are the most common ones and some ways to deal with them:
Technical debt accumulation
AMS teams often prioritize immediate issues and SLA targets, which results in repeated short-term fixes. This approach can lead to inefficient and difficult-to-maintain systems over time.
Solution: Allocate a fixed percentage of AMS hours (10–15%) to addressing root causes rather than just symptoms. Implement technical debt dashboards and conduct quarterly reviews focused on long-term maintainability.
Avoidance of legacy code
Teams are often reluctant to modify legacy codebases due to the risk of introducing new issues in interconnected systems. This results in delayed or avoided updates.
Solution: Assign a dedicated team to test and document legacy modules. Use a phased refactoring plan and schedule regular documentation activities to gradually improve the maintainability of the code.
Loss of critical knowledge
Over time, essential knowledge can remain undocumented and become concentrated in a few individuals. When those individuals leave, team productivity and understanding decrease.
Solution: Make documentation and knowledge transfer part of the team’s responsibilities. Record walkthroughs, rotate knowledge-sharing roles, and incorporate documentation updates into SLA requirements.
How can outstaffing help? Outstaffed team members can document systems thoroughly as part of their onboarding. If structured correctly, you can rotate or overlap outstaffed professionals to ensure knowledge and business continuity even during transitions.
Underutilized data for prediction
Although AMS teams collect large volumes of data, it is often underused for identifying trends or forecasting future issues.
Solution: Create a data analysis function within the AMS team. Use machine learning tools to find patterns in support data and regularly share insights with technical and product teams.
How can outstaffing help? You can hire data analysts or machine learning engineers with a staff augmentation company specifically for building analytics layers on top of your AMS process. These are often short-term needs that don’t justify a permanent hire.
Misalignment with business goals
AMS teams may focus on technical tasks without aligning them with broader business priorities. This reduces their impact on strategic goals.
Solution: Involve product and business stakeholders in planning and review processes. Evaluate and prioritize tasks not only by technical urgency but also by their business impact.
Legacy system constraints
Many AMS teams support systems built on outdated technologies with little documentation and complex interdependencies. These are difficult to maintain and update.
Solution: Add automated tests and monitoring to stabilize existing systems. Use APIs to separate older components from newer ones. Create a structured modernization plan and improve documentation on a continuous basis.
How can outstaffing help? Many outstaffing partners specialize in maintaining and gradually modernizing legacy systems. You can bring in people who are familiar with COBOL, Delphi, or other outdated stacks, without having to retrain your internal team.
Limited maintenance budgets
Preventive maintenance often receives limited funding compared to new feature development, especially when systems appear to be functioning.
Solution: Present AMS as a cost-control measure by showing the financial impact of unresolved issues. Use past incident data to justify proactive maintenance and visualize its effect on performance and delivery timelines.
How can outstaffing help? Hiring full-time in-house AMS teams, especially for non-core or legacy platforms, is often expensive and inflexible. Outstaffing helps you scale resources as needed, based on incident volume, system lifecycle stage, or audit cycles.
Difficulty hiring AMS talent
Recruiting professionals for AMS roles is often more difficult than for new development projects. These roles may require broader expertise and are less attractive to candidates.
Solution: Clarify the strategic value of AMS roles and create clear career development paths. Use external partners or outstaffing to close skills gaps and ensure ongoing knowledge transfer within the team.
How can outstaffing help? Staff augmentation vendors provide access to a global pool of experienced professionals, including those with rare or legacy technology expertise. Instead of struggling to hire locally, you can quickly bring in developers, testers, DevOps engineers, or system administration specialists with the specific skills needed for AMS.
***
Even in this example of web and mobile application maintenance services, you can see how beneficial outstaffing can be. It can help you fill gaps, but it is also a strategic tool to strengthen your AMS model without inflating your internal headcount or overloading your core team. Let’s talk if you want to give it a try!
