#1 Concern with Current Cloud Offerings: Application Performance!

by Peter

Recent research by Alcatel-Lucent shows that application performance is the #1 concern about current cloud offerings, with 66% of the 3,886 IT decision makers surveyed citing fear of outages and unacceptable latency of their business-critical applications.

• 40% of respondents reported service outages with the public cloud, while 25% complained there is not a resolution path when SLAs are not met.  Nearly half 46% -- experienced unacceptable cloud service delays, Alcatel-Lucent found.  The research revealed that enterprises in all markets are willing to pay for a next-generation, high-performance cloud solution. 
• Performance was also one of the big issues Cisco found in its most recent Global Cloud Networking Survey, the one that found that 33% of IT "decision makers" would rather get a root canal, dig a ditch, or do their own taxes than address network challenges associated with public or private cloud deployments.

I believe Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent were implying that smarter network infrastructure is essential for those seeking a higher performance cloud experience.  We at OPNET do not disagree.  There are many factors that affect performance, and network equipment is certainly a critical component (along with application design, system capacity, network bandwidth, optimization technologies, etc.).

However, it is clear to us from lots of experience that APM best practices can dramatically mitigate performance concerns related to cloud computing.  After all, organizations that invest in strong APM methodologies are able to isolate problems across the range of possible sources.

Our most successful customers and partners use the right APM instrumentation across the IT infrastructure.  This could be as simple as agent-less end-user experience monitoring to objectively measure service levels.  Broader visibility may require a combination of physical and virtual appliances for network-based monitoring, agents on end systems and production servers for deeper application component analysis, and transaction storage.  The benefit of doing APM right is that migrations are less costly, and more successful from a performance perspective.  You will know in advance which applications are ready to move, and what changes are needed to make them perform — not just during planning, but in the heat of a firefighting exercise.  And then the cycle begins again after the migration as new applications and versions are rolled out, and new upgrades are implemented.

Link to NWW article where I read about the new research is here.