From: Wired/Cloudline
Yama Habibzai
A consistent challenge for IT managers and administrators is to proactively monitor performance across the cloud, identify threats, and decrease any impact on the end customer. Without the right tools or procedures in place, these managers are typically working reactively, only responding once performance is adversely affected. Legacy systems that are in place at many organizations are simply not capable of properly monitoring cloud-based networks as they can’t handle scale and do not provide enough visibility.
To learn more about the state of network performance management, SevOne recently conducted a survey of 711 global IT managers at companies of various sizes and industry verticals. Fully ninety percent of the survey respondents report they do not have the confidence in their own processes to find network performance problems before end users report issues.
A lack of the right proactive management tools is the problem, with 30 percent of the respondents stating they only find out about issues when customers complain. They don’t have a system of alerts that would allow them to get a jumpstart on mitigation.
This lack of proactive alerts would not be as much of a problem if the incidence of problems was very low. However, 40 percent of the same group of respondents reported their organization needs to manage one to five issues every month, with 19 percent experiencing five to 10 critical issues every month. A troubling sign was the number of respondents that couldn’t pinpoint the exact number of incidents they experience a month, meaning they either don’t have a good system in place for tracking or they are simply overwhelmed.
Unfortunately, once problems are identified, conducting a speedy fix is not always possible. The study finds it takes an average of five hours for IT to detect a problem, find the cause and institute a fix. Five hours can be a lifetime for a business to be compromised or unavailable, and monitoring tools can shorten this window by identifying problems more quickly.
The core problem is in IT managers not having access to the right performance management tools, many of which are currently legacy systems that are simply not compatible with the cloud. These systems are often complex, cannot scale properly, or incur prohibitive maintenance costs that do not have good ROI. Many IT staff do not have the proper training to handle the unique challenges of the cloud and related management techniques. The BYOD trend presents another cloud-related hurdle, with 80 of the survey respondents reporting they are feeling stress about BYOD and its potential impact on their corporate network security and reliability. Managers who want their operations to run smoothly need to understand the cloud and BYOD are here to stay and need proactive performance management tools that can find problems quickly.
With 90 percent of administrators lacking confidence in their performance management processes, the need for more proactive solutions is clear. Legacy systems that are still sold on the marketplace today do not meet the needs of 79 percent of IT administrators according to the survey results. Today’s cloud-based applications need monitoring tools that can collect information across network devices, servers, and application response times. Modern performance monitoring tools allow businesses to better meet SLAs and provide continuous operation of services.
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