73% of companies fear Cloud providers hide performance problems

Compuware Corporation has announced the findings of a global survey of 740 senior IT professionals’ concerns about cloud computing adoption. Download the complete survey report here.

The study, which was conducted by independent research and consulting firm Research In Action, found that the majority of IT professionals (79%) believe that typical service level agreements (SLAs) built around availability are too simplistic and fail to address the risks of moving and managing applications into the cloud. Additionally, 63% of respondents indicated there is a need for more meaningful and granular SLA metrics that are geared towards ensuring the continuous delivery of a high quality end-user experience. When asked which metrics they would most like to see as part of their SLAs with cloud service providers, the top three responses were:
1. Response time and quality for every end user interaction;
2. Availability based on deep continuous monitoring; and
3. Real-time SLA reporting.

The findings also revealed that:
· Nearly three quarters (73%) of businesses believe their cloud providers could be hiding problems at an infrastructure or platform level that impact on the performance of applications.
· 60% of respondents expressed further anxiety that other, co-located tenants consuming difficult to partition resources impact their own workload performance.

“Entrusting mission critical business applications that drive revenue and critical business processes require ultimate trust and accountability in a cloud provider,” said Michael Masterson, Director of Cloud Solutions for Compuware APM’s business unit. “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. APM is no longer optional; and as customers bet on the cloud, they must demand granular SLA assurances around performance and rapid problem resolution.”

Additional findings from the study also showed that:
· 75% of IT professionals fear that the loss of control could prevent them from fully optimizing their application and reduce their return on investment from the cloud.
· The limited visibility into infrastructure was also found to be adding new risk and cost, with 62% of businesses claiming that they find it harder to troubleshoot problems in the cloud.

“Having handed over control to cloud providers, IT departments have lost much of their ability to troubleshoot and fine-tune IT services,” said Thomas Mendel, Managing Director at Research in Action. “This doesn’t just make it tricky to optimize performance for end-users, but it can also severely affect the bottom line. When faced with new IT challenges and risks, businesses can’t afford to waste time playing the blame game when something goes wrong. Having the ability to work with their cloud provider to quickly get to the heart of the issue and resolve the matter is essential to alleviate risk and hindrances while moving investment to the cloud.”