Applications

What are Applications?

Applications represent the software systems and service capabilities your organisation relies on. They bridge the gap between raw infrastructure (configuration items) and the business processes they enable — letting you understand which apps run on which servers and support which workflows.

Applications vs. Capabilities

Each application record is classified as one of two kinds:

• Application — a concrete software system such as an ERP, CRM, or HR platform.
• Capability — a logical service capability such as "email", "DNS resolution", or "file storage" that may be provided by one or more applications.

Criticality

Each application has a criticality rating that reflects how important it is to the organisation:

• Critical — loss causes immediate, severe business impact.
• High — loss causes significant disruption.
• Medium — loss is disruptive but workarounds exist.
• Low — loss has minimal operational impact.

Recovery Objectives

Applications can define recovery objectives to support business continuity planning:

• Recovery point objective — the maximum acceptable amount of data loss, expressed as a time window (e.g. "4 hours" means you can afford to lose up to 4 hours of data).
• Recovery time objective — the maximum acceptable downtime before the application must be restored.

Connections to Other Areas

• Entity — every application belongs to one entity (the team or department that owns it).
• Configuration items — applications are linked to the assets they run on. This answers "what infrastructure supports this app?"
• Business processes — applications are linked to the business processes they enable. This answers "which workflows depend on this app?"