It’s no longer a question of if enterprises and SMBs will move to the cloud but when and how. The cloud, in its vastly scalable and flexible iterations, has become pervasive in IT culture and the bigger question now is how IT teams are adopting and integrating it with their existing infrastructure.
Compuware Corporation, a provider of application performance management (APM) solutions that help MSPs and IT administrators optimize and monitor a growing number of applications, just concluded a global survey designed to find out the top concerns of IT professionals when considering cloud computing adoption. The company commissioned independent firm Research in Action to query 740 senior IT executives and uncovered some interesting findings about fears around service and quality levels.
According to the survey, 79 percent of those queried think service level agreements (SLAs) are lacking when it comes to cloud providers while 73 percent believe providers hide problems from customers. A further 79 percent of IT professionals think that conventional SLAs based on availability are too simplistic to cover cloud services and don’t address the risks involved with moving and managing cloud applications.
"Vanity metrics like simple uptime do not capture well-known issues such as 'noisy neighbors,' which can be detrimental to traditional enterprise apps that were not designed to scale and fail horizontally,” said Michael Masterson, director of cloud solutions for Compuware APM's business unit, of the survey’s results. “APM is no longer optional; and as customers bet on the cloud, they must demand granular SLA assurances around performance and rapid problem resolution."
The survey also found that IT professionals would like to see response time and quality for every end user interaction included as SLA metrics, as well as availability based on deep continuous monitoring. Real-time SLA reporting was also on the wish list for cloud service providers.
Another important concern when looking at cloud consumption was colocation, with 60 percent of those surveyed worried that potential difficulties with partitioning resources could impact the performance of their own workloads. An additional 75 percent of IT execs worry that losing control to cloud providers could result in a reduced return on investment and failure to fully optimize their applications.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
