To achieve corporate success, a company requires optimized IT processes. However, diverse application landscapes along with rapidly changing customer needs and market requirements are making it increasingly difficult for companies across all industries to manage their IT systems efficiently and operate them in a fail-safe manner. This challenge is forcing CIOs and IT executives to consider new solutions in application and infrastructure management.
For smooth operation in complex IT environments
Application Management Services – holistic services for your application and IT landscape
These days, it is not only the highest degree of availability that is required, but in particular a high pace of change and the ability to adapt quickly to new market situations. Long release cycles are no longer competitive. Agile methods such as SCRUM and DevOps are key to shortening reaction times and development cycles. Deployments occur every minute, while the highest demands are made on the availability and security of the business processes that are implemented. For this to succeed, modern application management that reliably masters the balancing act between the different objectives is required. LHIND has developed a holistic application (life cycle) management model that not only serves the requirements of the business but also focuses on the stable IT operation of complex and diverse system landscapes (application and infrastructure). Best practice approaches and standards such as DevOps, SCRUM and ITIL V3/V4 are applied.
What is Application (life cycle) Management?
The entire application life cycle at a glance
The functional scope of LHIND’s Application Management Services
LHIND has been operating a large number of applications for more than 20 years across different platforms for customers both within and outside the Lufthansa Group. There are now more than a thousand, many of them operating in 24/7 mode.
You, too, can benefit from LHIND’s wealth of experience and the specialist Application Management (AM) experts.
The term DevOps describes the connection between development and (IT) operations, i.e. between the development and the operational running of applications. The close interlocking of both areas of activity prevents potential silo structures and increases efficiency for both areas during the development process. The DevOps philosophy originates from agile software development. The aim is to bridge the gap from initial development to later application operation by having both areas develop applications in short, closely interlocked cycles and installing and operating them with stability in the production environment. This comprehensive approach goes hand in hand with an agile development culture in the company, in which elements such as collaboration, transparency and continuous product improvement present important pillars. As a result, deployment and release cycles can be greatly accelerated, meaning business requirements can be implemented more quickly in IT – all the while adhering to the consistently high requirements for stability and security in IT operations.
Using our integrated platform services based on cloud technologies, we help you relocate your operations and agile projects to DevOps.
What is Application (life cycle) Management?
Application management deals with the development and support of applications throughout their entire life cycle – starting with initial development and commissioning and moving on to stable IT operations, in conjunction with cloud technologies and agile development methods. Generally speaking, application management can be divided into the following areas:
Application operations are responsible for ensuring maximum availability of the applications and rapid recovery in the event of a failure.
This includes 24/7 application operation and monitoring, which monitors the applications around the clock and reacts as quickly as possible to any failures – both those that could potentially happen and those that are actually reported. Depending on the customer’s requirements, different service levels can be agreed upon, according to how critical each application is. In addition to the usual tasks included in service operation, our customers are supported in their daily operations by a customer-focused IT service management team. In addition to application operation services, full provider control in a single or multi-provider environment, up to and including general contracting, can also be provided on request.
Within the scope of application maintenance, failures are remedied and applications are both optimized and monitored. Comprehensive analyses of application performance are just as much a part of this as is the continuous improvement of the application through a range of quality checks in code quality, security and stability.
For this purpose, LHIND has developed a special operation and maintenance maturity model that helps the quality of the operated applications to be evaluated uniformly, allowing them to be optimized in the future if required.
The development of existing applications ranges from advising the business unit on possible implementation strategies, to providing specific technical specifications and maps of various test levels according to ISTQB, to implementation and deployment on the productive systems. The DevOps approach allows application releases to be made available for operation at shorter intervals, while high quality and stability is maintained.
The entire application life cycle at a glance
The life cycle of an application begins with the initial idea and its design. LHIND already provides support in this early phase, with expertise from experienced specialists who work hand in hand with AMS and DevOps experts and who know the processes, business and IT requirements of various industries inside-out, thanks to their many years of experience. When a new application is developed, the requirements of its intended operation in terms of maximum stability, availability and reliability are taken into account right from the start – yet the company’s need for flexibility and agility is also ensured. The LHIND AM model implements this approach through methods, processes, standards and IT compliance.
LHIND can provide support at an early stage in the application life cycle and, in turn, create the optimal conditions for a smooth transition to Application Management Services (AMS).
The functional scope of LHIND’s Application Management Services
From AMS consulting and the technical and functional operation of applications, to taking on central coordination across several IT providers, LHND guides companies every step of the way throughout the entire application (life cycle) management process. The following services and features are part of LHIND’s Application Management Services:
Uniform, professional first-level support for a wide range of IT applications, provided 24/7 and offered in both English and German, as the first point of contact for user inquiries. If a solution – for example, to application-related failure – cannot be found by first-level support, the Application Service Desk (ASD) forwards the failure to the next service level in the chain, but keeps track of its processing until the query is resolved. For example, the next service level could be the customer’s own operations support, a connected external provider unit or LHIND’s application operation.
This service includes the technical operation of applications, databases and platforms, including monitoring, incident, problem and change management, as well as deployment support. The focus here is on the early detection of failures in the company’s application landscape and solving them rapidly. This is supported by systematic knowledge management and a service operation approach that supports the responsible service units as they identify possible correlations and causes of failures.
The Operation Center (OC) service goes beyond the operation of individual applications and/or platforms and offers holistic management of technical operations:
Taking the relevant business processes as a starting point, a wide variety of applications and their infrastructures are operated around the clock with the close involvement of the providers. There is continuous, automated monitoring of applications and/or interrelated application landscapes (technical and functional) to ensure that business processes run smoothly. This also includes communication tasks and external provider management during troubleshooting.
Coordinating a customer’s many IT providers. Centralized provider management ensures IT stability across all applications and infrastructures. LHIND’s multi-provider management approach takes the individual characteristics of individual customer-provider relationships into account and controls them via central, standardized and scalable IT service and provider management. This enables customers to achieve economies of scale and to design and manage their provider portfolios in a competitive, future-proof manner.
Cloud-based provision of an integrated platform service for the development, migration and operation of applications. LHIND customers no longer have to deal with the complexity of the underlying technical infrastructure, allowing for faster application development and a focus on their own professional development.
Strategic, operational and technical consulting, taking into account customer-specific business requirements, operating models, technologies and architectures, as well as current developments in the market. LHIND’s AM specialists possess a wealth of expertise and experience in the requirements of various industries with regard to process, business and IT, as well as in application and IT service management methods, processes and standards. They support LHIND customers with conventional consulting and guide them to the conception and implementation of holistic IT service management solutions for complex application and infrastructure landscapes.
Development and maintenance of application components in connection with key technologies such as SAP, databases, EAI (interfaces) and application platforms.
Additionally, this area includes the design, maintenance and development of applications that form part of the most diverse technologies and architectures – this includes legacy systems and legacy languages, as well as the latest technologies and development languages.
The benefits at a glance
The benefits of LHIND’s comprehensive application management services approach for your company are clear:
- Focus – the IT department can focus more on content and drive the application’s technical development forward, while LHIND’s holistic application management services handle operation.
- Stability – the application, or application landscape, is comprehensively monitored, supported and optimized. This ensures operational stability, maximizes availability and optimizes application performance.
- Cost savings – Application Management Services enable your company to reduce both the need for internal, in-depth technical IT expertise and ongoing operating and maintenance costs. In doing so, AMS not only creates qualitative advantages, it also reduces your company’s ongoing IT costs in a very tangible way.
- Time savings – the DevOps platform and the associated agile development approach ensure that releases can be published more quickly and easily. Project and operations teams can use the existing, fully equipped LHIND DevOps platform, thus reducing both one-off and ongoing costs in the design and ongoing development of your applications.
- Experience and expertise – LHIND customers can draw on the AMS specialists’ many years of experience and expertise in the AMS environment.
LHIND offers application management services that cover the entire application life cycle. Since the prerequisites and requirements can vary greatly depending on the use case and the company, the scope of services is modular, customizable and covers both on-site and cloud infrastructures, up to hybrid variants, in application and infrastructure operation. Advice on IT governance and quality management, the introduction and implementation of IT service management tools and the migration of applications to the cloud round off the Application Management Service portfolio.
Companies that use LHIND’s Application Management Services want to…
- significantly reduce their rising IT unit costs by standardizing their IT operations
- focus on optimizing and developing their applications and therefore outsource their IT operations in whole or in part
- achieve holistic 24/7 monitoring via centralized IT operation of their application landscape
- make their application management more agile and push ahead with the introduction of the DevOps methodology
- significantly shorten release cycles to keep pace with market changes and requirements
- implement their new developments with cloud services and/or migrate their existing applications to the cloud
- introduce standard processes (ITSM or ITIL) in their application management or switch to a newer ITIL version
- reduce dependency on external providers and become more flexible
- hand over/centralize the management of their providers to experts
FAQ
What are Application Management Services?
Application Management Services provide support that typically involves maintenance, development and operation of a company's applications. If necessary, LHIND supports companies right from the beginning of the conception phase and a new application’s kick-off, for optimal coordination and integration into a future AMS model.
Why is application management becoming increasingly important?
IT environments are becoming more and more complex, maintenance-intensive and difficult to manage. The intervals between releases keep getting shorter, with the result that application support takes up a vast amount of time and resources. Complex IT landscapes, the increasing use of cloud services and other modern trends and technologies suggest that this development will continue.
What are the advantages of LHIND’s DevOps platform?
LHIND offers a modern and modular platform for software development based on cloud technologies. This promotes agile development methods and accelerates release cycles.
The LHIND DevOps platform
- enables easy entry into cloud technology and the transition of agile projects to DevOps
- provides a multi-application platform, incl. operation and maintenance, which is largely independent of the cloud provider
- offers a central contact for the integrated platform services (service integrator from the technical platform to the infrastructure)
- enables fast and cost-effective application development