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| Allan Paton |
By Allan Paton,
Today, 95% of organisations use some kind of cloud infrastructure to power their business. In
fact, according to a recent IDC report, total spending on IT infrastructure
products for use in cloud environments will grow 18 per cent in 2017, reaching
an estimated £35 billion. In contrast, investment in traditional non-cloud
architecture equipment will decrease by more than 3 per cent over the next 12
months.
A wide range of
organisations, from start-ups to large, global enterprises have adopted cloud
computing technologies to launch their applications, automate processes, and
store data. The reason is that by moving to the cloud, companies can reduce the
size of (or even eliminate) their data centres, achieve always-on availability,
improve mobility and collaboration, and benefit from flexible capacity, all of
which translates into increased productivity, and shorter times to market. Most
notably, the original premise for many organisations moving to the cloud is cost
savings. However this process can be expensive, as companies reshuffle and
retrain teams, and as a result, many businesses are talking about the hidden
costs of the cloud.
Cheaper simply can’t be the only reason to make a move to
the cloud. Organisations need to reframe the decision to move their
applications to the cloud around business value, and focus on two soft benefits
which may be just as important as any cost consideration: agility and
scalability.
Staying agile in a changing environment
Before cloud computing, it used to take companies a long
time to build an application and get it to market, or to enter into a new
market. For example, if a UK based organisation wished to expand into the US,
it would have to buy a datacentre there, build the infrastructure, and hire a
local team of experts there to troubleshoot when needed. Following this
process, which could take several months to complete, the company would finally
be in a position to launch services in the US.
However with cloud computing, an organisation can launch
operations in a different region in just a few days, by hiring the services of
an existing cloud provider. It can also use the cloud to build or update
applications, roll out new features, or accommodate new customers. Companies can
provision and deprovision unlimited resources as required, within hours instead
of months, and with minimal cost. That is true agility – the ability to deploy
and manage network services, applications, and edge IT as intuitively as
downloading apps onto a smartphone, and as instantly as spinning up compute and
storage resources into a public cloud.
Scaling resources to stay ahead
An added business value of cloud technology is that it
gives organisations the flexibility to scale up and down as needed — and fast.
This can be particularly relevant for a range of companies and contexts. For
instance, an organisation may launch a new app, attracting thousands of users
to the company website, or a retailer may see website traffic increase
exponentially on big shopping days like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. In both
scenarios, failure to meet traffic demands can have a negative impact on organisations’
reputation and bottom line.
In the cloud, business success is about being able to
scale up resources in order to support increased demand, and quickly update
applications in order to correct problems or add new features so that users
receive those updates automatically, wherever they are. By the same token,
organisations also need to be capable of quickly scaling down when they have
overestimated the capacity required for a particular application or time frame.
The ultimate benefit of moving quicker and deploying faster is achieving larger
market share.
Visualising the path to success
Guaranteeing the benefits of agility and scalability is
easier said than done. Both depend on achieving optimal application and network
performance, and can be hindered by problematic application codes, network and
connectivity issues, and server failure.
Most companies take a fragmented approach to application
performance management. Separate IT teams leverage specialised tools to
investigate network traffic, real-time communications problems, infrastructure,
and application performance-related issues. Each team sees only part of the
transaction, and effective communication between those teams is challenging
because they are using different, unsynchronised metrics. As a result, IT
wastes time trying to determine the root cause for performance problems instead
of fixing them. This translates into a reactive approach which falls short in
the complex, application-driven world.
The key to success is for organisations to establish
holistic, real-time, end-to-end visibility into application performance across
the entire network, so that they can establish a clear line of sight into how
apps are performing, and how they impact on the end-user experience. They need
to be able to answer: What is the latency? What is the user experience? Where
are users coming from?
This speeds organisations’ ability to pinpoint the root
cause of any issue, regardless of whether it originates in the application,
network, infrastructure, or end-user device. IT will then be able to take a
proactive approach to detecting performance issues, instead of reacting to a
problem after it has already hit.
IT will also be better positioned to help the business
make better decisions, empowering organisations to respond to changes in the
marketplace faster than ever before, maximising their efficiency and
productivity.
Allan Paton, Regional Vice President for UK, Ireland and
Sub-Saharan Africa at Riverbed Technology.
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