Once your custom software application is running, you surely want to keep it that way. With a partner like Augusto, you benefit from both app support and tech support teams.
What is the difference between app support and tech support?
App support teams are proactive. They ensure systems and applications run smoothly by identifying problems and deploying smart solutions. Technicians actively monitor your software and databases. They’re highly skilled in SQL, Java, front-end development, and .NET languages.
On the other hand, tech support teams are reactive. Think of it as the help desk. Their strengths lie in networks, systems, and other infrastructure.
How does Augusto ensure I have the correct technician handling each job?
Augusto support service representatives are available via ticketing, email, or chat. And you can trust that your support issues are triaged to ensure the correct technician handles each job.
At Augusto, we offer level 1, 2, and 3 technical support, which means you don’t have to diagnose your problems. We have the experts to help. When an issue arises, contact the Augusto helpdesk.
Level 1: A trained operator helps diagnose your problem, using handbook solutions to resolve the issue. Most issues are easily resolved this way. However, if a solution cannot be found, the issue is elevated to the next level.
Level 2: A technical expert with deep knowledge of the application assesses the issue and works to identify a solution. If a solution cannot be found, the issue is elevated to the next level.
Level 3: An engineer or programmer is called upon to recreate the issue and develop a solution. All new fixes are documented in the handbook for future use by Level 1 and 2 operators.
Don’t let your hard work developing a custom software application go to waste.
https://augusto.digital/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/3B2Hv71wKSTOQlEloQz648GBdA.png12801920Jim Becherhttps://augusto.digital/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Augusto-logo.svgJim Becher2021-12-06 00:00:002026-01-30 15:54:42What is the Difference Between App Support and Tech Support?
But then you quickly learned about the concept of application support: the teams that monitor, correct, and improve your custom software applications.
You might be thinking that you can get away without a custom software application support team, but that would be a mistake. Read on to uncover the benefits of application support and the risks of an unsupported app.
What are the benefits of custom software application support?
When an application is properly supported, it becomes highly agile and adaptive—driving maximum revenue for your business.
Here are six clear benefits for adding application support services—especially when you can outsource it to an expert:
Reduces ownership and labor costs
Frees up capital
Increases your technical expertise, regardless of staff turnover or absences
Allows your team’s focus to shift to more important things
Identifies outdated and unstable programs still in use
Integrates into your existing Helpdesk
What are the risks of an unsupported custom software application?
Without application support, your dear app could wreak havoc on your business and your users.
These are six fatal flaws you can avoid by adding application support:
Low productivity, disrupting business processes and functionality
Missed deadlines
Lost revenue
A negative brand experience
Reduced engagement—frustrated users will move onto a competing application
A lack of ransomware protection
Don’t let your hard work developing a custom software application go to waste.
Make sure you have app support to meet and exceed your business objectives. Call Augusto for fast, convenient, and seamless application support.
Our expert team is willing and ready to ensure your application is properly supported. Give us a call today.
What are the advantages of cloud computing? How do I know if cloud hosting is right for my company? Does the cloud keep my information safe and secure? Who are the most common cloud hosting providers?
In this blog, we dive into all these questions and more. Specifically, we explore how cloud computing enables faster innovation, lower costs, and scalable, reliable infrastructure for modern organizations.
Defining cloud computing
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of a global network of remote servers over the internet to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. They’re hooked together and meant to operate as a single ecosystem.
You typically pay only for cloud services you use; a concept known as pay-as-you-go pricing. This helps organizations lower their operating costs, run their infrastructure more efficiently, and scale as their business needs change.
The cloud is secure, flexible, reliable, cost effective, elastic, and easy to use. It allows businesses to expand their services and computing beyond their data center.
For example, it’s very challenging to use machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI), but the cloud allows companies to use these services in a cost-effective way.
Comparing the 3 major cloud providers: Amazon AWS, Google GCP, and Microsoft Azure
There are three major cloud computing platforms: Amazon AWS, Google GCP, and Microsoft Azure. In their own ways, they offer accessibility, reduce network and hardware costs, and provide businesses with access to a range of applications.
There also are a handful of solution-specific players, including Alibaba Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle, and Salesforce.
Here we detail the three most commonly used platforms:
Amazon AWS is one of the longest-operating cloud computing platforms. It has been an industry leader for more than ten years and is most suitable for businesses that want to work on the public cloud.
Gartner has listed AWS as a leader in the Magic Quadrant for Infrastructure and Platform services for multiple years in a row.
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform that integrates seamlessly with Windows, making it a smooth process for businesses that use the Windows platform on-premise. It allows for an easy transition for moving on-premises software to the cloud.While it has been criticized for not being as well-developed as some of its competitors, is a great hybrid cloud service solution.
Later to the game, Google GCP applies its technical experience to create a large number of tools that incorporate deep learning, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and data analytics. As a newer player, Google GCP has fewer data centers and offers a smaller range of tools.
Comparing the three types of clouds: Public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud
Some of the confusion around cloud computing stems from the fact that there are multiple types of services that fall under the large umbrella. These are the three types of clouds.
The Public Cloud
Public clouds are the most common form and the version we at Augusto use most often.
In this type of platform, the cloud resources are owned and operated by a third-party cloud service provider and delivered over the internet. You share the same hardware, storage, and network devices with other cloud tenants.
Advantages of public clouds:
Lower costs: no need to purchase hardware or software; pay only for the service you use.
No maintenance: your service provider offers the maintenance
Near-unlimited scalability: on-demand resources meet your business needs
High reliability: a vast network of servers decreases risk
The Private Cloud
A private cloud is used exclusively by one organization. While the cloud can be located in your onsite datacenter or hosted by a third-party provider, the services are always maintained on a network dedicated solely to your organization.
Advantages of a private cloud:
More flexibility: customize your cloud environment to meet specific business needs
More control: higher levels of privacy are possible
More scalability: compared to on-premises infrastructure
The Hybrid Cloud
A hybrid cloud combines on-premises infrastructure (a private cloud) with a public cloud, allowing data and applications to move between the two environments.
This type of platform offers greater flexibility and more deployment, security, and compliance options. Organizations receive the flexibility and innovation of a public cloud while keeping highly sensitive data within their own datacenter.
Advantages of the hybrid cloud:
Control: your organization maintains a private infrastructure for sensitive assets
Flexibility: take advantage of additional resources in the public cloud when needed
Cost-effectiveness: pay for extra computing power only when needed
Ease: you can migrate to the cloud gradually—phasing in workloads over time
The four types of cloud services that make up the cloud computing stack
Although there are many types of cloud computing services, they all have a few basic features and advantages in common and can be categorized into four basic cloud service offerings.
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
The most basic category is infrastructure as a service (IaaS). In this case, organizations rent IT infrastructure (including servers, storage, networks, and operating systems) and pay as they go. Many organizations start with this model as a way to move physical servers from their data center to a virtual server in the cloud; called lift and shift in the industry.
IaaS is helpful for customers who want to create cost-effective IT solutions while outsourcing most of the complexities to a service provider. This type of cloud service provides scalability, security, and performance increases over the traditional datacenter.
IaaS allows a business to migrate the cost and responsibility of maintaining the underlying hardware, network, infrastructure, and security to the cloud service provider.
Additional benefits of IaaS include:
Cost savings: You’ll no longer need to maintain hardware and software or pay for any capacity beyond what you need.
Scalability and flexibility: Companies can scale up and down as needed, only paying for the services they need. This provides the ability to expand as you grow.
Support for disaster recovery and business continuity: Companies can use the cloud service providers’ solutions for a highly redundant disaster recovery plan outside of the traditional datacenter.
Examples of IaaS include virtual machines and hypervisors.
PaaS (Platform as a Service)
In addition to providing IT infrastructure, platform as a service options add in the computing platform and solution stack as a service.
PaaS allows software developers to build custom applications without worrying about data storage and management. It’s easier for non-experts to develop an application through single click functionality.
Advantages:
Speed to market: PaaS allows developers to build, configure, secure, and deploy applications quickly. It removes the typical barriers of hardware, software, and infrastructure.
Pre-configured: Developers can take advantage of pre-build and pre-configured components.
Scalability: PaaS environments can handle large workloads.
Future proof: They also automatically receive bug fixes, updates, and features. This allows developers to focus on creating; not on the environment.
One common use for PaaS is databases. Augusto often uses Amazon RDS in our client solutions.
SaaS (Software as a Service)
SaaS incorporates both IaaS and PaaS service offerings, providing application-level services tailored to diverse business needs on-demand. It provides cross-device compatibility and no initial setup cost.
It’s the most familiar cloud computing service, as users are accustomed to interacting directly with SaaS applications like Gmail, Dropbox, or Netflix. Augusto integrates with these services, helping people to use productivity tools like these.
FaaSFunctions as a service/serverless computing
FaaS is a young cloud computing service that’s becoming a game-changer. It’s a serverless computing concept that allows software developers to build applications and deploy actions without maintaining a server.
This type of cloud service increases efficiency by eliminating server logistics. At Augusto, we use this type of cloud service very often. For example, we use Lambda from AWS.
“Cloud development allows Augusto to quickly turn your ideas into solutions. Using Infrastructure as Code (IAC) and serverless (SaaS) architecture, we can quickly create secure, scalable, and flexible applications,” said Jim Becher, Augusto solution architect and technical lead.
Benefits of cloud computing and why Augusto Digital uses it
At Augusto, we help a variety of people and organizations take full advantage of cloud computing. From the CEO to the Vice President of IT to the product owner, everyone has unique preferences and priorities for cloud usage.
Here, we outline five ways Augusto uses cloud computing to help our clients succeed in their business objectives.
1. Speed to market innovation
Cloud platforms are typically self-service, meaning, provided on demand. This gives businesses great flexibility when bringing an idea to market.
We can use the cloud to test new ideas, allowing a cost-effective, self-service model. If an idea works, you can scale it fast. If it doesn’t, they can shut it down without waiting or relying on IT.
Most cloud computing services are “pay as you go,” meaning you can start and stop services (and payments) as often as you’d like. You’ll get exactly as much storage space and as many features as your organization or project needs.
For example, businesses can limit what they spend in the cloud by turning servers or services off when not used, such as on the weekends.
3. Scalability
Different companies have different needs, and using the cloud enables organizations to efficiently scale their IT infrastructure and services up or down according to business demands. And it’s scaleable both horizontally and vertically, meaning it can deliver the perfect amount of IT resources, right when you need them.
4. Reliable method of data security and disaster recovery
Cloud platforms significantly decrease disaster recovery risks because data and services can be mirrored at multiple sites on the cloud provider’s network.
5. Continuous new features and updates
Cloud providers continually add new technology features and products, so take advantage of this benefit. PaaS and SaaS services and applications can automatically refresh and update themselves, saving valuable IT staff time.
This is hugely helpful because, in a traditional data center, you’re responsible for updating hardware and software occasionally. In the cloud, the systems can be updated for you.
Augusto’s three cloud computing services
Whether you’re just making the leap into cloud computing or need more advanced solutions, Augusto Digital is here to help.
“With cloud computing, we can give our customers the ability to quickly innovate on new solutions and applications. Cloud based development allows for speed, agility, and flexibility when creating new software applications,” said Jim Becher.
Cloud Strategy, Architecture, and Migration
You know that moving to the cloud offers greater business agility. You also know you likely need a team to implement a migration plan that defines what to migrate, where, and when. So when it’s time to move your data and workloads to the cloud, we’re here to help. Cloud hosting and managed services. We have the flexibility you need to develop and design cloud solutions that meet — and exceed — your expectations. We offer DevOps collaboration for all our cloud services, including Serverless backend, containers, database development and analytics, security, and identity access management (IAM).Cloud data analytics & insights. The cloud is an ideal place to store critical data used in day-to-day operations. We understand the concepts behind quality data analytics. And we can help deploy your cloud computing with powerful analytic software to identify patterns in your data and extract new insights.
We’ve explored the history and present state of cloud computing. But what’s next? What should we each be prepared for? And how can you begin implementing these tactics?
Here are six trends we’re seeing in 2021.
92% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy: IT departments are realizing that the platforms they’re using require it, and are making the work happen.
There’s currently a higher than expected cloud usage due to COVID-19 restrictions throughout 2020: Remote workers needed to be outside of physical buildings and data centers.
There’s a higher cloud spend than ever: But organizations are struggling to optimize their existing cloud usage and spend.
The adoption of Azure draws the platform closer to leader, AWS: Specifically with companies that have a Microsoft platform.
There’s greater adoption of data reporting and analytics inside the cloud: With so much data contained, it’s easier for companies to report via the cloud. Machine learning and forecasting also use large quantities of data.
There’s a higher adoption of low-code or no-code solutions: Developers and business users are able to assemble code rather than develop code into applications.
We’ll continue to monitor other trends and keep this updated as we enter 2022. What additional trends would you add to this list?
Security is the base component of the cloud. The graph then moves into the various activities people can do in the cloud. As you move up the stack, you can see which services are available with each of the different types of cloud service.
Final Thoughts
Cloud computing helps organizations move faster, scale on demand, and reduce infrastructure overhead by using the right mix of public, private, or hybrid models and services. However, the goal isn’t to use everything. Instead, it’s to choose the cloud approach that best supports your security needs, budget, and speed to market.
https://augusto.digital/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/jmpXbG4lwsx8mIqspnECfHqg.png5761024Jim Becherhttps://augusto.digital/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Augusto-logo.svgJim Becher2021-11-03 00:00:002026-02-06 16:28:22Benefits of Cloud Computing: Why You Should Use It
It’s out in the world, and users are loving it. Until… someone calls with a problem; you discover a bug; need a patch; a new API update drops; or the threat of a security breach occurs.
Now what?
You’ll need a custom software application support team. Custom software application support teams monitor, correct, and improve your apps.
About 90% of their time is spent calmly checking messages, monitoring the system, and working through process improvements. However, the remaining 10% of the job involves quickly diagnosing problems and restoring systems.
Four services Augusto’s custom software application support offers
Whether Augusto built your custom application or not, we’re here for you. Our customizable support service allows us to meet and address your specific application needs.
Application Monitoring:
We keep an eye on your application, so you don’t have to. Our monitoring tools will alert our helpdesk on key items like your domain, SSL, and application uptime.
Helpdesk:
Submit tickets and report bugs, then our team will follow up with questions and troubleshooting to help prioritize the issues. Helpdesk is the primary way to communicate with our support team, as it allows a single point of contact for you to get assistance. We’ll provide the status, priority, and all other information around your issue.
Corrective Maintenance:
Corrective maintenance, commonly referred to as addressing “bugs” or issues, is the most typical change associated with support. These bug fixes often come in the form of small, rapid updates.
Adaptive Maintenance:
The technology environment is constantly changing—with new security threats, version updates, and software dependencies. It’s critical that you update your custom app regularly. Adaptive updates focus on the infrastructure of your app, providing the foundation to keep the system up-to-date and running smoothly.
Don’t let your hard work developing a custom software application go to waste.
Apps are not something you can set on a shelf and forget. Call Augusto for fast, convenient, and seamless application support.
Our expert team is willing and ready to ensure your application is properly supported. Give us a call today.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the capability of physical products to transmit data over a network.; however, its impact goes beyond adding the internet to devices. It provides an opportunity to create new value for organizations and their customers through data models.
At the center of this value are data models. These models deliver usage analytics, product support metrics, and operational insights that teams can monetize to create new products and services.
Three ways to create value with IoT
When organizations adopt IoT, value typically emerges in three key areas.
Build better products: Introducing data to devices can extend their functionality.
Support products better: Knowing how products are being used reduces the time and effort to diagnose, support, and improve system problems.
Operate products better: IoT can put a pulse on products, allowing organizations to understand their current state. Preventative maintenance, location tracking, and system health can enable organizations to be proactive in delivering value.
Exploring IoT with BLE
One common approach to enabling IoT is Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Specifically, BLE is a variation of the Bluetooth standard designed to minimize power consumption. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group introduced it in 2009 as part of the Bluetooth 4.0 specification.
Because of its efficiency, BLE has become a popular option for embedding IoT capabilities into products. It offers many benefits including:
Low manufacturing cost
High-speed data transfers
Long-term battery life
Small form-factor can be embedded easily
Mesh networks provide non-hierarchical data relay capabilities (ie: large sensor networks)
Although BLE is proximity-based, teams often link it to an internet-enabled bridge that relays data to the cloud. From there, they develop data models.
Major cloud service providers (like AWS IoT Core and Azure IoT Hub) offer enhanced data capabilities like machine learning, advanced analytics, and secure data persistence.
Healthcare
The Healthcare industry stands to benefit from IoT in numerous ways. IoT extends a healthcare provider’s ability to serve patients through enhanced medical equipment, augmented physician capabilities, and more descriptive patient data. As a result, IoT data models give insurance companies better metrics to assess risk more accurately and reduce overall costs.
Adding IoT to healthcare systems delivers data on equipment usage, patient care patterns, and procedural improvements that help manage or prevent disease faster and with less risk.
For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, ventilators became scarce. As a result, IoT-enabled ventilators can provide data on location, usage levels, and potential maintenance needs. Healthcare providers can track, distribute, and maintain ventilators with data-driven decision making. In the long term, these data models can be used to design and re-engineer ventilators with a enhanced understanding of their current limitations.
Conclusion
Augusto has developed IoT systems using a variety of technologies, including:
AWS IoT Core
Azure IoT Hub
Various microcontrollers
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
Embedded systems software development
Cloud Architecture development
IoT is transforming the internet and is quickly becoming an integral part of consumer, industrial, commercial, and environmental systems. With well-designed data models, there is measurable value across industries like healthcare by reducing costs, lowering risk, and improving performance.
Call Augusto for fast, convenient, and seamless support
If you’re exploring IoT solutions, Augusto can help you move quickly and confidently. Schedule an intro call today to see how our IoT-centric approach can modernize your systems and unlock new value.
https://augusto.digital/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/AwLJUUNMTLVCcr2iUut13Pnxc8M.png5761024Brian Andersonhttps://augusto.digital/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Augusto-logo.svgBrian Anderson2021-05-10 00:00:002026-01-29 21:33:55Creating Value with IOT
While they’re often an afterthought, web forms are an important element of the user’s experience on any website. In many cases, they’re the only opportunity your users have to communicate with your organization.
A well-designed web form impacts customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and even the perceived credibility of your organization as a whole. In fact, according to Stanford’s Web Credibility Research, 75% of users say they judge a company’s credibility based on its website. Even though web forms can seem very simple, there are a number of important considerations to weigh. Modern frameworks like React have introduced an abundance of new resources and design patterns for developing forms.
Augusto Digital recently worked with a client to develop the profile management flow for their new alumni portal. During this project, we encountered a number of interesting challenges related to web forms. Below we analyze several tools that we used throughout this project.
Form State Management with Formik & Yup
A classic problem in web development is form state management. In other words, how does a page keep track of which fields have been edited, whether the form is submitting properly, and what to do with a response from the server? What about field validation and error messaging?
Formik is a forms library for React that greatly simplifies these processes. It eliminates many of the repetitive aspects of form development by keeping track of form state and validation. Formik also makes it easy to customize the form submission flow for tasks such as preprocessing user input.
One of my favorite features of Formik is integrated Yup schema support. Input validation is traditionally one of the more challenging aspects of web form development, but Formik and Yup greatly reduce that burden.
Customizing validation rules and behavior happens through simple templates. For example, our solution for this client enabled users to link multiple email addresses to their account. However, we needed to ensure that each email address wasn’t already associated with the account before submission. By adding a custom validation step to our form, we checked the input against the existing list of email addresses.
A form can be configured to validate inputs on change, on submission, and/or when a field loses focus. This ensures that errors can be timed to maximize helpfulness and minimize abrasiveness. It also helps reduce the computational load of more intensive validation steps, by tightly controlling how often they run.
Creating Better Select Elements with react-autosuggest and Fuse.js
Our work with this client involved several complex select and multi-select elements. For example, alumni selected the clubs and organizations they belonged to during their time at the university. The system loaded options for these elements from a server-side table, with some lists containing hundreds of entries.
We needed a solution with intelligent type-ahead prediction and great performance, so we opted for a combination of react-autosuggest for the input element. React-autosuggest’s highly-customizable select elements were a great candidate for large lists of options with long names.
These elements also include the ability to provide custom matching functionality, so we used Fuse.js for fuzzy matching. This combination allowed our inputs to be more forgiving with exact phrasing, spelling, and capitalization.
If the element being searched is an object with multiple key/value pairs, it’s possible to supply weights for the various keys. By giving some keys higher values, we can treat them as preferred when searching against multiple values simultaneously. In the example below, we have weighted a state’s abbreviation more highly than its name. This allows us to assume that the string “AK” is more likely to represent “Alaska” than “North Dakota,” even though the two letters do not appear next to each other in the former.
React-phone-number-input and Google’s libphonenumber for international phone numbers
Another common obstacle with web forms is how to handle something like input masking for a phone or credit card number. Input masking fills in the dashes, parentheses, and other special characters as the user types, in order to make the number appear more familiar in its formatting.
When done well, input masking makes it much easier for the user to digest long strings of numbers. But when it’s done poorly, users can experience performance issues, confusing errors, or even corrupted data.
These problems can be amplified when there is uncertainty over what format the number should take. One example of this is a phone number input field. It’s rarely safe to assume that all phone numbers will be of the same nationality. There are many formats for phone numbers throughout the world. How, then, do we go about determining how to mask and process these numbers?
A great option is react-phone-number-input. Built on top of Google’s libphonenumber library, react-phone-number-input is a highly-customizable input element that allows the user to select the nationality of their phone number. In addition, settings for default country and locality-detection. By storing both a phone number and its country of origin, it’s always possible to present phone numbers in their intended format.
Modern webforms offer a level of power and customizability that was only a distant dream in the early days of the web. When the correct tools are leveraged effectively, the result can be a complete transformation in the quality of your users’ experience. Although the nuances of good form design are subtle, studies have shown that providing a good experience for your users is a great investment. In fact, every dollar spent on UX has been shown to return between $2 and $100.
https://augusto.digital/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/8GvCAtzW7pnFKdQ2qG1HLFP2o.png10241024Joel Rosshttps://augusto.digital/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Augusto-logo.svgJoel Ross2021-04-27 00:00:002026-02-06 15:47:43Modern Web Forms in React
