New Research Finds a Growing Cloud Applications Performance Gap

January 8, 2016 No Comments

By Steve Brar, Director of Platform and Solutions Marketing, Riverbed Technology

Cloud applications relieve the IT department of the headaches that come with maintaining all systems and applications in data center, but now a new headache is coming on and growing increasingly worse. A new report finds that a majority of users experience frustrating performance slowdowns that hurt their productivity on an all-too-frequent basis. This creates a significant performance gap between the needs and expectations of the business and IT’s ability to deliver. IT’s perceived failure puts it in the line of fire for the negative impact this performance gap has on users’ productivity, which in turn leads directly to angry customers, low employee morale, damage to a brand’s reputation and lost revenue.

The Riverbed Global Application Performance Survey 2015 finds that 98 percent of executives agree that optimal enterprise application performance is critical to achieving optimal business performance. And yet, 89 percent of executives say the poor performance of enterprise applications has negatively impacted their work. Even more alarming is the regularity with how often those disruptions occur: 58 percent say it impacts their work at least weekly, and 36 percent say it affects them every day.

Despite these frustrations, enterprises continue to migrate more apps to the cloud. Nearly all (96 percent) of respondents use cloud-based enterprise applications in their work, 84 percent say their company’s use of cloud-based enterprise applications will increase over the next two years.

However, consistently poor performance negates those benefits. Survey respondents report that when an app is slow, crashes or not available, the resulting productivity loss creates a domino effect that impacts the company’s bottom line, including dissatisfied clients or customers (41 percent), contract delays (40 percent), missed critical deadlines (35 percent), lost clients or customers (33 percent) and negative impact on brand (32 percent).

There seems to be little realization outside IT how difficult, time-consuming and costly monitoring application and network performance across a hybrid environment is becoming. Globally, 71 percent of survey respondents said they have frequently felt “in the dark” about why their enterprise applications are running slowly.

Executives can then compound the problem by trying to work around it. Thirty-seven percent of respondents admit they have used unsupported apps when corporate apps run slowly or stop working altogether, thus adding to infrastructure complexity with more “shadow IT.”

Achieving full visibility

IT must have end-to-end, real-time visibility across the entire network and all the applications running on it to be able to understand how specific users and events behave in order to ensure performance and quickly locate the root cause of any problem across the network. This enables IT to more quickly pinpoint what is causing a performance delay and fix it before users experience a disruption to their work.

A majority of the executives surveyed agree that better visibility by IT staff into application performance would close the application performance gap, resulting in increased productivity (56 percent), improved customer service (54 percent), improved product quality (49 percent), improved employee engagement (46 percent) and increased revenue (43 percent). To deliver superior application performance in today’s hybrid environments, enterprises need a comprehensive solution that provides end-to-end application visibility, optimization and control.

Of course, IT cannot just snap its fingers and suddenly this level of visibility. There are four key steps to take before migrating an on-premise app to the cloud or deciding to roll out a new cloud app to users:

1) Determine network constraints: First, implement network and application performance monitoring solutions to gain an understanding of the network’s performance constraints.

2) Optimize network constraints: Determine how to overcome potential bottlenecks such as distance, latency, loss and disconnections – the most common performance constraint in today’s cloud-centric global economy.

3) Identify inefficiencies: not all apps are of equal importance, and therefore, not all require IT to allocate equal amounts of bandwidth. Over-provisioning (and wasting) bandwidth to non-critical applications, and eliminate them.

4) Implement a real-time performance dashboard: Provide network administrators with a single view of the network and advanced analytics that enables rapid detection and remediation of issues.

Establish control

Of course, identifying the cause of an application’s poor performance is only half the battle. If IT cannot move quickly to address it because it is too reliant on the service provider, the performance gap will remain open.

IT cannot fight these battles alone. Pulling in critical service providers and trusted peer network can be invaluable in helping to determine where the bottlenecks and blockages are in the network. They can also help identify trends in the data that may point to the development of an even bigger disaster own the road.

Achieve the necessary levels of control, and the math becomes as simple as 1+1=2. Visibility+Optimization=Control. This may seem simplistic, but this equation refers to IT’s ability to keep applications performing at optimum levels and ensure information is available to all employees in headquarters, remote offices, or on the road.

The speed at which enterprises migrating from on-premise applications to cloud-based services, users’ high expectations for consistent performance, and the fact that more and more of those employees are working remotely all combine to drive a wedge through an ever-widening application performance gap. Closing the application performance gap is now a business imperative, but IT cannot control what it cannot see. Enterprises need to provide IT with a clear view of how all apps are performing, whether they are on-premise or in the cloud, and whether the user experience helps or hurts employee productivity.