A survey found that nearly three quarters of IT companies believe that the cloud providers are hiding problems at an infrastructure or platform level which impacts application performance.
About 60% of those 740 senior IT professionals surveyed by Research In Action for Compuware expressed further anxiety that other data tenants consume difficult-to-partition resources which hits their own workload performance.
Three quarters of those surveyed anticipate that loss of control could act as a barrier to harness the potential of the cloud. Limited visibility into infrastructure is another area of concern, with 62% of businesses finding it difficult to troubleshoot problems.
Research in Action managing director Thomas Mendel said having handed over control to cloud providers, IT departments have lost much of their ability to troubleshoot and fine-tune computer systems.
"This doesn’t just make it tricky to optimise performance for end-users, but it can also severely affect the bottom line," Mendel said."When faced with new IT challenges and risks, businesses can’t afford to waste time playing the blame game when something goes wrong.
"Having the ability to work with their cloud provider to quickly get to the heart of the issue and resolve the matter is essential to alleviate risk and hindrances while moving investment to the cloud."
Four-fiths said typical service level agreements (SLAs) built around availability are too simplistic and not able to address the risks of moving and managing applications into the cloud. 63% of them believe that more meaningful metrics will ensure continuous delivery of a high quality end-user experience.
Compuware APM business unit director of cloud solutions Michael Masterson said entrusting mission critical business applications that drive revenue and critical business processes require ultimate trust and accountability in a cloud provider.
"Vanity metrics like simple uptime do not capture well-known issues such as ‘noisy neighbours,’ which can be detrimental to traditional enterprise apps that were not designed to scale and fail horizontally. APM is no longer optional, and as customers bet on the cloud, they must demand granular SLA assurances around performance and rapid problem resolution."
