25th March 2011
Business Cloud News has been granted an exclusive insight into the some of the biggest issues affecting cloud computing providers across the globe. This week, Richard Stone, Cloud Solutions Director at Compuware, explains how application performance is critical to the success of cloud computing.
Navigating through stormy waters
By Richard Stone, Compuware
There can no longer be any doubt.
Cloud computing is driving a fundamental shift, not only in the way organisations view IT, but in the way they build, deploy and use applications. It is has now moved from being marketing hype and has become a true business enabler.
Indeed, appetite for the cloud is increasing; recent figures from Gartner show that 39% of businesses currently allocate IT budget to cloud computing as a key priority, whilst 46% are planning to increase cloud services from external providers by 2011.
Yet, despite this interest, at Compuware, we’ve spoken to 300 large businesses across Europe and found that on average 57% are slowing down or stopping adoption of further cloud applications. This is because each of these organisations is losing approximately €608,000 every year due to performance-related problems with cloud-based applications, such as e-commerce sites and Internet-based business applications. It’s fair to say that performance issues are having a direct impact on revenue, and that only once these problems are solved will the true capabilities of the cloud be unleashed.
Cloud computing provides on-demand access to shared resources over the internet from any location. Traditionally, it is viewed as a cost-effective solution for businesses as it helps avoid capital expenditure and upfront IT costs. However, it is fast becoming recognised as an enabler of business agility and flexibility. For example, cloud computing removes the dependency on internally developed or customised third-party software (with the almost inevitable delays and cost-overruns), thereby providing rapid ‘time to value’ to support the quickly changing needs of the business.
In addition, with the rise in mobile workers, there is a rapidly growing need for ubiquitous access to documents and emails on the move or from remote locations, along with the ability to collaborate more effectively with colleagues around the world. Cloud computing can support these demands, as remote workers can easily access their vendors’, their customers’ and their own company network wherever they have an Internet connection.
Poor cloud performance erodes customer trust, reduces end-user adoption and impacts company revenue. The problem for IT in managing performance is that where once IT departments had complete control of applications and data because everything resided in their data centre, it now sits beyond the firm’s firewall and thus out of their control. It is therefore important that the approach used to manage applications also becomes “borderless”. The only viable solution is that the entire application delivery chain - both internal and external application components - must be managed in an integrated, end-to-end fashion across whatever sort of cloud infrastructure they are hosted on, not just in the existing data centre.
In order to provide effective performance management, cloud computing will also force businesses to redefine exactly what constitutes a Service Level Agreement (SLA) in this new IT world. We found 84% of European businesses expect more rigorous SLAs that go beyond simple availability metrics, as they increase their use of cloud applications. At the same time, 72% of businesses admitted that their ability to guarantee service levels is severely restricted because cloud applications are delivered over an open network - the Internet. This shows that organisations fully expect changes will have to be made when looking at performance management over the cloud.
Interestingly, research has also indicated that it is business leaders (CEOs and Line-of-Business owners) rather than IT (leaders, developers or technical staff) who are currently driving cloud adoption, as they begin to understand how it can solve challenges their businesses face today as well as to help adapt to changing business environments. However, the drawback is increased application management complexity. So while cloud adoption is driven from the very top of the business, end-users will still expect applications to perform well and it will be IT that comes into the firing line if they don’t. Hence the challenge for IT is to meet the business expectation of faster delivery of new functionality, while also maintaining end-to-end visibility and control of application performance and availability across a rapidly growing network of third-party service providers – all of this in real-time.
Indeed availability and performance are one of the main issues with the cloud, as found by a recent IDC 2010 study ‘The Maturing Cloud: What it Will Take to Win’. While Cloud Computing does provide many benefits, the risks must be addressed and carefully managed to ensure its success.
As PCs and the Web did before, the cloud is dramatically changing the IT landscape with its promise of new levels of business flexibility and agility. It’s up to IT and the LoB together to steer their companies in the right direction so they can realise that promise.
Richard Stone is the Cloud Solutions Director for the Compuware Corporation
www.compuware.com
Tags: applications | software as a service
