All Grown Up @ Oracle

An independent survey showed that cloud infrastructure was the number one IT investment priority for CIOs in the short and long terms. There were also concerns expressed about the pace at which the cloud has matured.

As opposed to initial concerns about data security, now the objections are more business oriented. These concerns make the podium with the CIOs when it comes to the cloud:

• Bottlenecks spoiling the experience for users.
• Loss of brand loyalty and status due to the poor user experience.
• Loss of revenues caused by the unavailability, dismal performance of the cloud and related troubleshooting costs.

The enormity of this became clear as day when Amazon, Apple and Microsoft all suffered cloud blackouts last month.

As the majority of companies already use cloud for customer facing and revenue producing applications, its management has moved from just maintaining servers and racks. The focus is now growing towards innovation as large companies vouch to replicate the achievements of their start-up competitors. Infrastructure and service on demand allows development at a swifter pace, shortening product cycles and diminishing the obstacles to ingenuity.

Additionally, as the stakes get higher, IT managers use a hand- on approach with systems; and  get more concerned about reduced visibility into cloud providers.  Majority of cloud service providers don’t offer much assurance of response time levels;  in a world where customer experience is the real measure of success, the usual red-yellow-green dashboard looks to lose its meaning.

As the cloud starts to mature the major business concern relate to loss of control. There are questions of blame on third party cloud services like social media, ad servers and video analytics among others. As is when you go with gut feelings rather than solid evidence, you are bound to waste money; therefore it is obvious why CIOs have nightmares about the cloud.

There are a few ways however, for a business to take control back when it comes to cloud systems:

1.  Visibility! Visibility! Visibility

The most common primary cloud performance metric is uptime and if that’s the case with you, then you haven’t really covered it right. Simplistic dashboards and server response time averages just don’t cut it in today’s complex cloud environment. Individual transactions need in depth monitoring metrics.

You may be guaranteed 99.9% uptime, but that translates to an expected 9 hours of darkness on the cloud annually. Can you afford that kind of downtime during the peak holiday season? Any penalty or reimbursement won’t be enough to cover such losses. Demand deep visibility into the true performance your Cloud app and be prepared to resolve issues as and when they occur.

2. Customer Rules and that’s the Rule

A huge gap in assessing cloud performance is the lack of perspective from the eyes of the end user. Dashboards, like statistics, are only as good as the information they provide. Even the best server monitoring tools can leave you lacking a sense of what the customer is experiencing. That’s why it is critical to oversee “from the edge of the internet” considering the customer’s location and device used, while carrying out real time analysis; and the business impact of varying performance levels .

A deeper understanding of e-commerce platforms as the most used cloud platforms enlightens our understanding of how outages or slowdowns directly affect earnings. And the problem has become much more complex. Recent studies show that consumers are getting impatient and will move on if what they want takes more than just two or three seconds to load.

This shows the importance of correlating business metrics, such as conversion or abandonment, with the performance received by the end user. Patterns to act upon will emerge from such an analysis and can directly boost revenue. For this an evaluation with your own end user performance monitoring and business impact analysis with an external provider’s work is essential.

3. Catch the bug before it bugs you

CIOs realize that in the present day complex cloud world, troubleshooting problems takes a lot of time and money if you don’t have an in-house data center. This requires support or development teams to gather detailed information ASAP to solve an issue at first sight or even before it is seen by the world. If the guesswork can be taken out and the need to recreate problem areas eliminated, then teams can move quickly and be aware that bugs can be removed quickly.

We can see that the cloud is getting more jobs than ever before and it is growing to meet the challenge. This can be seen in the vast amount of services offered and providers tailoring to the needs of vertical industries.

Businesses are learning to take control of their cloud based infrastructure allowing them to fully utilize their efficiency and sociability. As you get ready build their next gen profitable mobile and social solutions, Ephlux is prepared to be a catalyst in providing the optimum solutions you want.