What are application services?

Availability refers to services designed for effective routing and balancing of network and internet traffic to ensure that an application can perform its desired function. Availability application services include:

• DNS
• Load balancing
• SDN gateway

A relatively new focus for application services, mobility application services support applications that empower mobile computing and its associated processes. These include:

• Endpoint security
• IoT gateway
• VDI

Performance application services exist to improve the effectiveness, efficiency and performance of applications. These services include:

• Acceleration
• Caching
  
• Compression
• HTTP/2 gateway
• SSL/TLS offload
• TCP optimisation
• WAN optimisation
  

Finally, application services that are part of the security category help protect vital data, secure sensitive applications and prevent infiltration from threat actors of all kinds. Security application services include:

• Anti-fraud
  
• Anti-virus
• Botnet protection
• Firewall
  

Given how expansive application services are and the potential impact they can have on business performance and efficiency, it is natural that many organisations would want to delegate or outsource application services and application service management to proven third-party providers. An application service provider (ASP) is a business that employs transactional pricing to deliver functionality and related services in support of specific applications via a network.

An application service provider allows organisations of all sizes and across all industries to manage their application services at scale, optimising application maintenance and support while reducing cost. At the heart of modern ASP is the increasing prevalence of AI and automation technologies.

Correctly applied, application service automation turns difficult and error-prone manual service tasks into repeatable automated processes that produce highly accurate results. This move towards automation in application service management and ASP results in increased service uptime and effectiveness, allowing businesses to accomplish more while applying fewer of their finite IT resources to servicing applications.

Because ASP is hosted remotely via third parties, it is often grouped together with SaaS solutions. But while there are some similarities, the two approaches are not strictly the same thing.

SaaS models tend to service a range of tenants using the same version of the application, including all its features and upgrades. SaaS solutions provide access to their own proprietary software. The user does not own the licence to the software, but instead purchases the right to use it on an as-needed basis. The provider hosts and runs the software from an external site and handles release management on behalf of the customer (usually a business or other organisation) who accesses the application solely on the web via a standard web browser.

On the other hand, ASP is often considered a more rudimentary approach. The provider manages and hosts applications developed by other third parties. ASP may also require that clients install the third-party applications locally, maintaining a separate instance of the application from other users. As such, updating ASP instances can be much more time consuming and costly.

Modern application service management combines the functionality of ASP with the advanced capabilities, accessibility and support of cloud-based SaaS solutions. ServiceNow, the leader in IT management, is on the forefront of this revolution.