Application Maintenance and Support Services

Software does not stay still when you stop touching it. Dependencies accumulate vulnerabilities, certificates expire, cloud providers deprecate services, browsers change behaviour, data volumes grow past the point the original queries were designed for, and the one person who understood the deployment process leaves. An application that received no attention for two years is not in the same condition it was in — it is measurably worse, and the cost of catching up grows non-linearly.

Our maintenance engagements cover four things that are genuinely different from each other. Corrective: incident response and defect resolution under agreed severity levels and response times. Preventive: dependency and framework upgrades, security patching, certificate rotation, backup restore verification, and capacity headroom review before it becomes an incident. Adaptive: keeping pace with browser, OS, cloud provider and third-party API changes that arrive whether you planned for them or not. And perfective: a proportion of hours reserved each month for improvement — performance work, technical debt reduction, or small enhancements the business asks for.

That last category is what separates maintenance from life support. Contracts that only cover break-fix produce software that degrades slowly and predictably; we deliberately allocate capacity to improvement so the application is in better condition after a year of support than it was at the start. What that capacity is spent on is your decision, reviewed monthly.

We support applications we built and applications we inherited. For inherited systems we start with a transition period — knowledge capture, documentation of what is missing, environment access verification, monitoring installation and a risk register — before any SLA commences, because committing to response times on a system nobody has mapped is not a commitment worth having.