If you’re using or have developed a customised piece of business software, this article is for you.
We’ll be exploring your support options, and giving you a recommendation on the best ways to go.
To do this we’ll look at:
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Who builds/uses custom business software and why (read this to make sure you think: that’s me!)
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The unique support/hosting and maintenance needs for custom business software/applications
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The options on the market
Who builds/uses custom business software?
First things first.
What is custom business software?
This is a matter of definitions.
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A business application is one that fulfils core business functions; it can be customer facing, but is more often internal: CRM, payroll; compliance management.
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A custom application is one that’s built from scratch outside a standard template or one that has had significant customisation at the code, logic and/or data level.
Therefore, your typical custom business application might be something like a from-scratch payroll solution or an off-the-shelf CRM extended to a PostgreSQL backend (via custom networked APIs) for nested hierarchy functionality.
Who builds/uses these custom applications?
Typically these are either sold to businesses requiring something extra for their core functions by a developer or they’re built by internal teams.
Many stakeholders, or even customers, may end up using them.
What are the unique needs in custom business software support?
Software support is already a slightly nebulous term. We use it here to mean:
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24/7 support, monitoring and incident management
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Hosting and maintenance – shading into environment design
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Change management and system evolution
Unique needs for business software in the 24/7 department
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Customising an off-the-shelf application (as in our CRM example) often takes certain fixes and/or monitoring needs outside the scope of the product’s support team – you require a third-party option to cover the gaps
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The observability and monitoring stages require extra set-up to capture the application’s unique failure conditions
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The runbooks and fixes themselves require customisation
Unique hosting/environment needs for custom business software
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If customising at the data layer, your standard tables (RDS etc.) will need to be configured to match
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Exact coding languages will need to updated in instance images
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Custom integrations and APIs will need support at the networking level – for instance you might need to interface with a specific supplier’s application (maybe to check stock) who require secure connection
Unique codebase continuity needs for custom business software
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Library and framework upgrades must be manually tracked and applied. For example, a custom quoting tool built in Django may rely on packages no longer maintained, requiring code changes and testing during upgrade
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Security fixes and dependency updates require hands-on code maintenance and redeployment, unlike SaaS, there’s no upstream vendor pushing automatic patches.
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Without active stewardship, codebases accumulate technical debt that can block change – even small updates may require unpicking legacy logic or rewriting brittle components
So, what’re your options?
Retained developer partnership
Handling the code side of things is often the easiest. If you built your own custom business app – you’ve got the skills in-house.
If you had a partner build or extend an application, they have the skills in their house.
Retain them.
Internal training
It’s more often the support and environment design that go beyond the people who built/customised the app in the first place.
To cope with this, a common option is to bulk up the deployment team, building out expertise in disciplines like SRE, DevSecOps and platform engineering to cover the gaps.
The good thing about this option is this team will know your app’s needs like the back of their hands. The bad thing is it costs money and time – substantially.
Outsourced business software support team
A cheaper way of bringing in expertise at the environment/support level is to outsource. An MSP with a great track record of custom business software support will be knowledgeable on the kinds of unique support and environment needs you’ll need.
This obviates the need to form a whole new team internally and hands you the skills required on a silver platter. The downside is that some teams will always prefer to do everything in-house for variously good reasons.
How we can help
Your search for an outsourced business software support team ends here. What a coincidence.
At Just After Midnight, we build, maintain, and support environments for custom apps and instrument monitoring and observability to gain a 360-degree, bird’s-eye point of view – perfect for swooping down and resolving incidents in the event anything goes wrong.
Not sure we’re the ones for you?
Read about our work supporting custom solutions for:
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A major player in the bunkering industry (build and customisation on AWS)
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Major SaaS journey planner serving the likes of five guys and Taco Bell (keeping the app running and responding to incidents in under 4 minutes)
So, don’t make it till you break it. Let us be the custodians of your shiny new customised application. Just drop us a line.
