4 maintenance problems that will cost your business a fortune

What happens after implementation is as important as planning and software development. And it also affects overall success.

Besides, you always have things to improve, the market is constantly changing. Therefore, you have to update and advance the software to win your customers.

The following phase after implementation and deployment is maintenance. It can include software upgrades, repairs, and fixes of the software or equipment if it breaks.

Software applications often need integrations with new systems the customer deploys. You have to provide additional testing of the software or its upgrades. During the maintenance phase, you can face errors or defects, which would require repairs. There is also a place for monitoring the performance in this phase.

Here are the most common problems that businesses encounter during the maintenance phase:

1. Unexpected Breakdown

That happens when you don’t observe your infrastructure. It can stop working during an important process, and you won’t be able to provide services to your clients. As a result, the business loses money and customers.

Solution: Implement 24/7 automated monitoring and alerting for all your services. You’ll be sure that everything works as expected at any time. Also, your team will be notified if something goes wrong.

2. Downtimes

They can be planned or unplanned. Planned downtime can improve equipment productivity. It is usually scheduled for non-working hours or holidays and allows you to perform all the necessary technical work calmly. But it’s not the same when we talk about unplanned downtime. It affects your daily operations, processes, and productivity.

Solution: proper planning to make scheduled downtime successful, so you won’t face unexpected downtimes.

3. Maintenance not formalized

We talk about cases when infrastructure and services need more maintenance time than usual. The reason — your team doesn’t have enough experience with the used tools and services. It is hard to predict what will fail this time and its cause. In addition, there’s no proper documentation about things configuration and work. That means maintenance is not formalized and becomes a pain.

Solution: pay attention to the documentation of every implemented process. Always check if maintenance managers are able to notice, allocate, and fix an issue or make a proper patch.

4. Maintenance Expenses

One of the biggest constraints maintenance managers feels is budget allocation. Maintenance expenses are balanced by deducting expenses from other areas.

Sometimes to solve a problem you need half a workday of one dedicated engineer, sometimes it is two working days for a team of 3. In such a case, this activity will take the capacity of engineers who are busy with other activities. Another option — you should always have free engineers to help. Both options are expensive for your business, as they lead to unpredictable delays in product delivery or to additional costs on unused capacity.

Solution: maintenance managers need to understand how long the assets they have will work efficiently. There is a need for a proper balance of maintenance, repair, and operation parts.

If you want to save time, budget, and nerves, but deal with maintenance issues effectively — there is a solution.

It is DevOps as a service. It moves traditional collaboration of development and operations teams to a new and easy level for you. With it, you can automate many of the processes and your engineer’s capacity won’t be a problem.

Furthermore, it will help you to easily manage your software and infrastructure during the maintenance stage of SDLC.

If you want your product to function as intended and have minimal downtime — contact us.

By choosing us, you’ll get maintenance support services to optimize uptime and end-user productivity for critical apps and infrastructure.

We will thoroughly investigate your infrastructure to define the best option for you. It depends on the scope of the work. As we have a few plans with different amounts of hours and services, it is way more flexible for you to choose a suitable one:

• S package: up to 40 hours per month, with an additional buffer of up to 10 hours. It will be convenient to collaborate as we will be in touch to handle incidents during a regular working day.
• M package: up to 80 hours per month and a buffer of up to 20 hours. We’ll be there for you to handle your maintenance problems for 16 hours a day during the work week.
• L package: up to 120 hours per month and a buffer of up to 30. We’ll handle your maintenance problems at any time during the work week.
• XL — an individual package: up to 160 hours per month and a buffer of up to 40.

You’ll have 24/7 support and a resolution time within 30 minutes.

Check our site to discover more about DevOps as a Service by Dedicatted and our pricing.