Application Platforms Owen Cole
The concern over application performance in the cloud was elevated further, as a third of respond- ents (30%) declared that performance auditing and accountability was the top reason for avoiding cloud adoption altogether. This was followed by 20% claim- ing that achieving unified performance management across the datacentre and 12% saying keeping track of assets made them avoid cloud adoption.
TOO MUCH TO HANDLE
In today’s overcrowded technology space, it’s easy to see why IT managers struggle with clarity around cloud computing. With so many new devices and applications coming on to the network, the entire management of IT as a whole can become cloudy itself. What’s important is that the IT department has full visibility of the whole network as well as all the applications running over the network. Currently, IT departments are primarily using traditional agent-based monitoring tools, which frankly, aren’t cutting it. Organisations are struggling to achieve visibility due to additional day-to-day pres- sures, the complexity around how to manage traditional tools and the difficulty of adjust- ing to a rising number of applications and servers.
Another fatal error that the IT depart- ment makes when dealing with applications in the cloud is that many assume that the cloud vendor takes care of performance measurement. However, vendors typically only monitor resource utilisation such as CPU, memory, and capacity, and not the applications and their flows, nor the transactions. More importantly, these vendors do not provide correlated, cross-tier vis- ibility for the entire application delivery chain. Relying on cloud vendors to do this for you is a dangerous mistake to make, and one that needs resolving fast, because without unified measurements, it’s impossible to see how your applications are per- forming for the end-user.
Bewildered by cloud blindness, IT managers are failing to keep up with other initiatives wider than cloud, such as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) poli- cies. With so many additional technologies and initia- tives to get to grips with, not to mention implement, IT departments unfortunately don’t even have the time to research effective solutions that could consequently make their lives easier and promote the benefits.
RAISING OPERATIONAL INTELLIGENCE By introducing technologies that offer granular analy-
sis of applications in the cloud, the strain and lack of
www.cloudcomputingintelligence.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Owen Cole
Owen Cole joined ExtraHop in July 2011 as VP EMEA, following a 10-year tenure at F5 Networks. At F5, Cole was a Sales Engineering Manager where he helped the company deliver Technical Design and Pre-Sale support before being appointed Technical Director in 2006. Prior to joining F5 Networks, Cole owned his own application company where he developed bespoke solutions, before going on to work with several organisations within the communications sector, including: PSINet and Connexion where he oversaw operations at mission critical data centres in London and Amsterdam.
January 2013 CCI Magazine
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understanding around performance management in the cloud will be loosened.
Organisations must use solutions that detect and intercept problems before they happen and intelligently offer information in a clear way so that IT managers can fulfil the need of the C-level execu- tive who can then fulfil the need of the customer. A network-based Application Performance Management (APM) solution would eliminate the blindness that IT managers fear by automatically discovering new appli- cations and devices, and deterministically measuring application performance across the network, web, VDI, database, and storage tiers.
By operational intelligence through the use of network-based APM, the IT department can be far more productive and reactive. Without it, these issues will affect customers, with potential loss of revenue and damage to the reputation of the company brand.
Footnote: Capgemini, Business Cloud: The State of Play Shifts Rapidly: Fresh Insights into Cloud Adoption (29/11/12)
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