Wednesday 7 June 2017

Learn More About Application Management

Application management is not managing the job applications you receive for the vacancies in your company. Application management is organising business IT activities and it has a broader concept.

By definition, application management is the process of managing the operation, maintenance, upgrading, troubleshooting or removing an application during its lifespan. In a broader sense, it also includes techniques and procedures to adopt for the optimum performance of the application, best practices, effic8iency increment of the application for the enterprise resource use and the back-end IT infrastructure.

Application management is an enterprise wide policy for complete IT governance approach so that the optimal application performance can be obtained. This policy includes inputs from business and IT perspectives and serves different objectives.

The most important aspects of Application management are:

• Application owners: The management of the company or the key decision makers who will judge the AM from revenue, profit and control perspectives.
• Application managers: Key decision makers in IT department who are responsible for application deployment, maintenance and development.
• Application users: these are mostly the company employees and the security, privacy, upgrade and troubleshoot are some of the issues regarding this group.

Application management also has some divisions like Application Portfolio Management (APM), Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Application Performance Management (APM).

You Must Upgrade Your 16 Bit Applications

If you come to know that your company has such a vulnerability which can not only cripple but can kill your business, you will probably become serious. However, you will be even more surprised to know that this particular vulnerability is currently perceived as a strength by your company. The sad truth is that most of the companies rely on IT systems which might soon become obsolete, called legacy system in IT terms.

A legacy application is a type of software or application which serves a purpose but is completely backdated or obsolete. 16 bit applications, for example, are legacy applications because no computer uses 16 bit architecture anymore. These applications were developed by the companies when 16 bit architecture used to be the standard. With time, the architecture became more advanced, 32 bit, 64 bit and even 128 bit. The companies failed to upgrade the applications for two reasons, firstly they didn't want to disrupt the existing system which might have affected their revenue flow and secondly because they felt the application is serving the purpose and don't mend something which isn't broken.

Now we are in the era where mobile and cloud computing is the standard and thus, these 16 bit applications should really be upgraded to something modern. In fact, the support and the maintenance cost of these applications would only increase with time. You need to spend on keeping them compatible with modern computers and operating environment as well.

Keep These In Mind While Remotely Deploying Windows 10

Remote deployment of Windows 10 is a great example of proper SCCM implementation, but you need to keep the following in mind.

• Standardisation: Don't create too many different configurations. It will save a lot of effort during the roll-out. It will also reduce the burden of support in the future. You should have a few sets of applications and configurations.

• Group Policy: If something can be configured using group policy, you should certainly use that. It is easily managed and it can be easily changed in the future.

• Hardware: All the systems should be modern and should have at least 2GB of RAM. You should have standard hardware and not too many different models to handle. Hardware from major vendors is the key here as they have better support.

• Base Image: The base image should be created using the most basic computer. This image should have the pure OS. Some patches and some customisations can be done on the OS. VMWare can also be used to create a virtual PC for this purpose. ]

• User State Migration: USMT (User State Migration Tool) is a great choice for transferring user data and setting into the new OS but it has a bug as well. This bug can be nasty because it requires on fix from the server side and another fix from the user side. Moreover, USMT is configured using XML files which needs certain level of expertise. If you can avoid using USMT, do that.

Avoid Malware Attack Using Windows 10 OS

You must have heard about the Wannacry malware infection. This is a global crisis now and it affected computers which ran Windows XP and Windows 7. These operating systems don't receive any update from Microsoft now because the official lifespan of these operating systems have died. The hackers were able to find a flaw in the security system of these OSes and they exploited that to attack the computers which are still running these. The result is disastrous. Thousands of computers, some of them being critically important to different organisations got their data corrupted and held for ransom.

If you want to avoid this situation, you should upgrade your operating system. The latest OS from Microsoft, Windows 10, was immune to this attack because it receives regular security updates. The computers running Windows 10 had no vulnerability and thus, these were not attacked by the hackers. Thus, it would be prudent if you decide for a Windows 10 migration for all the computers, your personal one and your organisations.

Apart from being immune to the malware threats, Windows 10 is really the best OS right now. It is fast, it is intuitive and it is the safest operating system in the world now. While you can perform the upgrade for your personal computer by yourself, it would be wise if you choose a professional agency for the organisational upgrade because all the computers might not be at the same place and remote deployment of the OS might be necessary.