Application Management & Support
Application Management and Support, covering the complete Application Lifecycle is an activity in which Serco has been delivering services for highly technical and scientific organisations for a number of years.
That being said, recent technological advances and trends have changed the business beyond any comparison of its early beginnings.
Increased demands for mobility and scalability, combined with comprehensive integration in support of business transformation, mean that the complexity of the activity has increased significantly, and a broader base of expertise and skills required.
Serco deliver services managing hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, and deliver key communication and collaboration tools to thousands of users globally.
Historically, ensuring an acceptable level of application delivery has always been important, however it was rarely the top question for the majority of companies and IT responsible directors. Over the past few years, however, as more and more transactions move online, and the complexity of the tasks undertaken by applications increases in terms of process support, Serco supports its customers in ensuring concerted effort into this field of activity, underpinned by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
Increased mobility in workforce and customer areas, and the enabling technology, have opened new markets and communications channels both internally and externally. Technology systems have enabled an increased level of interaction, and it is now become critical for Technology and Business strategy to be carefully considered in a holistic manner to ensure that investments made look to transform the business, increasing productivity, delivering cost benefits and maintaining pace with the competition.
Technologies such as cloud computing, unified communications, Virtualisation, Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications can all be levered to support business transformation. However, the deployment of these systems and their on-going management must be carefully linked to the business requirements, and service structured to ensure the most cost effective flexibility. The Serco approach looks to ensure performance of applications is measured against their impact on the business, and that they co-exist and integrate to support transformation.
However, delivery systems must be carefully balanced with the provision of the correct environment, from bandwidth and load considerations to the practical implementation and on-going management of security provisions. Security is a primary consideration, particularly as data provision and interaction becomes increasingly mobile and remote and models such as Software as a Service (SaaS) are adopted. These changes have led to an increase in cyber-crime (1,090 security vulnerabilities tracked by CERT in 2000, up to 7,236 vulnerabilities in 2008 - source: www.cert.org/stats).
We help our clients operate, maintain, and optimize critical IT networks, as well as provide computer network defence and information security. Serco manages and optimizes operations and technologies, protects group rights issues, and leverages advanced Web-based architectures to migrate legacy applications and data to the Internet.