Why protecting Application Capital should be a key priority to every App-Centric business

In my recent commutes to work, I’ve taken the liberty of participating in a quick mindless activity where I note down surrounding passengers who missed their stop due to their smartphones. At last count, there have been at least 20 victims sucked in by digital distraction.

It’s a sad reality, but this universal armour that the public now carries also signifies something—that in this brave new digital world, the value of modern enterprises resides within applications. Businesses are fuelled by them, users connect through them, and employees can’t complete their tasks without them.

Take Facebook for example. Despite spending just under US$15 billion per annum on computing infrastructure, the popular social networking service carries an application portfolio valued at more than half a trillion dollars. Such a heavy investment should come as no surprise, seeing how its share price drastically plummets with every global outage that occurs. Inadvertently, for an increasing number of digital-native businesses, applications can account for tremendous value creation.

And to make for a strong case, here are just 3 more reasons why.

1.    Equipping customers with the best solutions

When it comes to building an application-centric business, having your customers wait a couple of extra seconds for an application to load often risks disappointment. In this world of instant gratification, this would mean that businesses must be able to deliver applications quickly and reliably anywhere, at any time.

But how do we safeguard against such processes?

The key is to ensure consistent application services across your portfolio. This can be as simple as standardizing policies that oversee core application services such as traffic management and security. In doing so, applications will not only be easily and securely deployed to any cloud, but also enable time and cost efficiencies within the continuous integration and delivery pipeline. Likewise, optimal levels of user experience will follow – from surfing an online store, sharing a social post, all the way to seeking live customer services via a corporate website.

2.    Steer clear from evolving security threats

Despite all the chatter in business today on where the buck stops, an astonishingly large number of employers have shown little regard for how deeply exposed their businesses may be to security threats – until it’s too late.

Consider the episode when Singapore’s healthcare agency was hacked—exposing personal data of around 1.5 million patients. The organisation might have appeared to carry a secure set of cybersecurity protocols, but that wasn’t enough. Aside from several middle-management complacencies, the probability of unpatched backend systems might have left their software vulnerable to exploitation.

With most breaches occurring at the application level, protecting your data means thinking about application security first. This can be as simple as employing a thorough evaluation and understanding of each individual component that makes up your businesses’ entire application portfolio. By doing so, the right solutions can be identified and put into place for you to gain the security needed to mitigate today’s advanced threats.

3.    Innovate and garner organisational velocity

Organisations are no longer held back by former patchwork ways of working and the technologies of yesterday. According to F5’s 2019 State of Application Services report, 66 percent of Asia Pacific businesses are already engaged in ongoing digital transformation initiatives, with an average of 16 application services being deployed within enterprises, up from 11 in 2016.

All this points to a new era where digital transformation is driving the growth of application portfolios and shifting the ways in which they are developed, integrated and absorbed.

To keep pace, businesses ought to fully capitalize on their transformational journey by directing more emphasis towards securing their application capital. This can be as simple as fostering an innovation-led approach, where developers have the freedom to build and deploy new and improved applications, leading to improved profit and efficiencies as businesses venture into new markets.

The effective management of your application capital is what will propel your business to new heights. Just like how human capital involves basic services for a business to succeed, applications do too. This not only warrants achieving maximum results over time, but also exposes your business to the minimal risk.