Seek certification of outsource partners

Enterprise applications outsourcing, despite a host of guidelines, brings lots of doubts.

Application service providers (ASPs) manage and deliver application capabilities to multiple corporate customers from data centers across a WAN. IT managers must always evaluate effectiveness and whether a better choice is to build and/or host the company’s needed applications in-house. After all, vital company data is at stake. The growing trend toward industry certification, however, ensures the quality of the ASP and allows IT managers to outsource applications with confidence. 

A certification program undertaken by the ASP industry promulgates 24x7 services and reliability as a norm for business Internet-based services. Under this program, service providers, independent software vendors and system integrators must go through a rigorous specification process, which closely examines their infrastructure, operational practices, hardware, software and overall service delivery guarantees to ensure that the provided services and applications meet high industry standards. 

For applications certification, guidelines specify how to architect, develop, implement and deploy software for quality delivery over the Web to achieve increased availability, reliability, security and performance. Specific evaluations and test suites must be completed for each application. An independent third party audits the results and grants certification when all criteria are satisfactorily met. 

Spearheading these efforts is a council composed of representatives from industry, where certified enterprise vendors deal with industry developments and how those impact current certification standards and specifications. It sees to it that certification specifications are continuously updated and validated by the service provider community. 

Certified applications outsourcing allows IT managers to focus on their businesses’ core competencies, and grow revenue and reduce costs significantly in a variety of ways. IT managers do not have to build and support expensive and complex applications’ infrastructures. With increased efficiency and performance, the total cost of ownership is reduced.

Certified outsourced applications allow IT managers to pay as they grow, and thus avoid unnecessary capital investments. They get top-of-the-line, cutting-edge applications for a monthly rental fee. Certified outsourcing also relieves the heavy administrative burden and associated expense of locating and recruiting IT resources staff to implement applications in-house. 

Several certification requirement categories should be carefully investigated when considering outsourced applications: architecture, platform and software, adaptability, service and support, user authentication and security, sizing, scaling, and availability. 

A clear and high-level description of the product’s architecture must be supplied; its primary server components must be supported on a scalable and reliable operating system; and the developer must demonstrate commitment to support and service processes to ascertain whether or not the application provider or independent software vendor can meet service-level agreements. 

The product needs to be functional through a remote interface and accessible through a firewall. Privacy and integrity of user data and confidential internal data must be protected. As for the performance, scalability and capacity of a candidate application, a proven definition of entry-level, midrange and top-end configurations must be provided.
Lastly, the product must be targeted to achieve a defined level of availability acceptable in a top ASP environment, and reference customers operating in ASP environments must be provided. 

IT managers will find that some enterprise applications simply cannot be outsourced, while others are prime candidates for outsourcing. Cost can determine which applications to outsource. 

Beyond cost considerations, IT managers should take into account the risks they can incur by selecting noncertified outsourced applications. Problematic areas crop up in an application’s architecture, the platform on which it is running, the associated support policy, security, and in an application’s performance, scalability and capacity. IT managers should check an application’s availability ratings, which are based on critical-component reliability, service and infrastructure availability, upgrades, backups, reconfigurations, and application cycle times. 

For more information from Sun Microsystems:
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