12 Essential Questions To Make Sure Your Applications Drive Productivity and Profits

I think we can all agree that most businesses these days use software applications to drive every aspect of the business.

VoIP, video, ERP systems, vertical specialized accounting software, real-time replication and other business critical applications like CRM tools are driving most businesses operations, customer communications and ultimately profits.

What these applications really represent are a means for a business to save time, drive productivity and create more profits.

When those applications aren’t available to do that, it often creates frustration both internally with company users and externally with the businesses customers. These days it’s not just frustrating, but also results in loss of productivity and — yep, you guessed it — a loss in profits.

So to make sure your new application is going to drive productivity and profits, here are some of the questions you should be asking:

• Where are these applications stored — private, public and/or hybrid cloud?
• How do you get your users to these apps? Public internet or private WAN?
• Are they secure and highly available?
• Who is responsible to make sure they are available?
• What network resources do the applications require?
• Are they business-critical or simply nice to have?
• Are they latency-sensitive?
• Do they require QoS or prioritization?
• Do you have SLAs on availability that match your access to them?
• Who’s going to make sure the access meets all of your needs?
• Who’s installing, testing and ensuring that applications are available?
• Do you have several vendors for this access? Hardware? installers? A single carrier or two carriers? Who manages the alerts and troubleshoots the issue when the applications aren’t available?

It can be daunting, to say the least, to provide highly available access to these applications that drive your business!

The path to productivity and profits can often be a narrow one, and it’s contingent upon a well-documented plan of where the application is going to fit into the enterprise and then having a highly available path to those business critical applications.

Enter the use of software applications to drive every aspect of the business.

Application service providers have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that offer 100% availability so customers can access those applications. Setting up the application to be productive for your business is critical, and just as critical is making sure you have access to the application at all times so your team can remain productive.

That’s the business we are in.

At EnableIP, we build highly available WANs so our clients can leverage their cloud applications 24/7/365. That’s all we do, and we’re pretty darn good at it.

We hope to help you soon with putting the puzzle pieces together in this important area.