Cloud technologies have become increasingly essential to business operations today. Recognising the benefits delivered by these technologies, organisations across different sectors are implementing and upgrading their cloud strategies to accelerate their digital transformation efforts. In fact, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) the GCC public cloud market is expected to reach approximately US$2.3 billion, growing more than double in value by 2024.
Furthermore, hybrid cloud strategies are also gaining popularity among businesses. The ability to respond to business needs by shifting applications and services across private, public clouds, and on-premises data centers, makes it a terrific option for many businesses. Furthermore, a recent study revealed that about 85% of surveyed UAE C-suite executives plan to adopt hybrid cloud solutions due to their extensive benefits in terms of flexibility and cost savings.
Shifting applications to the cloud has become an increasingly important long-term strategy for businesses looking to improve IT efficiencies while reducing CapEx and OpEx costs.
However, as many businesses implement cloud migration strategies, they must ensure that end users have reliable access and high performance during and after those application migrations. Without adequate service edge visibility, IT teams can find themselves hard-pressed to troubleshoot and resolve issues with an unresponsive application.
In a highly demanding digital world, delivering uninterrupted, secure, high-performance services that delight end-users before, during, and after migration of workloads to the public cloud is the difference between success and failure.
Prioritising End-User Experiences
Complaints from unhappy end users may sound like an IT problem, but these problems can have a significant business impact. For example, imagine a company with employees in branch and regional offices who use an application that is vital to its just-in-time supply chain model. The company moves that app to the public cloud, and users immediately begin to complain about much slower application performance. As a result, employees are unable to keep up with inbound orders, which has the ripple effect of harming customer service and impinging on revenue due to delayed orders. In the case of this company, cloud application performance issues created significant reputational risks for the business.
Problems such as this are often compounded when troubleshooting tools used by IT provide inconclusive results. In the aforementioned example, the company’s application had a legacy design that was never meant to work over high-latency links. So, when user actions ended up being “chatty”—in other words, involving a high number of individual transactions—latency is introduced, causing the app to become slow or completely unresponsive. Unhappy users put pressure on IT to find the root cause of the problem.
Thus, an organisation should seek to migrate workloads to the cloud in such a way that they run efficiently, with no disruption or down time, and with greater flexibility than can be achieved in legacy environments. It is critical that organisations have the right depth of visibility into workload performance and service levels.
Cloud Monitoring Is Key to Providing Visibility at Service Edges
Enhanced service edge visibility is crucial for IT organisations planning to lift and shift legacy applications to the public cloud. Companies can use advanced cloud monitoring solutions to analyse application behavior, revealing the effect of additional delays in the time taken to complete multistep end-user tasks.
When business-critical application performance depends on service quality delivered by a public cloud provider outside traditional IT control, pinpointing the root cause of latency issues is increasingly vital.
Thus, cloud monitoring can enable IT to assess how an application is performing in the cloud, and as result, whether the provider is meeting negotiated service level agreements. In the end, service edge visibility will enable IT to assure that performance is acceptable and that end users are kept happy
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