Large enterprises are migrating both front-office and back-office applications to the cloud, but focusing on private clouds, according to a survey by transaction performance management firm Precise.
The survey found that in 2011, 39% of organisations moved email and collaboration systems to virtual infrastructure, followed by IT management (33%) sales & marketing (20%) finance/HR/ERP (21%) and security (13%).
Thirty-three per cent of respondents report that they will move Finance/ERP /HR applications to the cloud in 2012, followed by E-mail and Collaboration software (23%) and IT Management applications (21%).
The survey revealed that in future, 37% of companies will migrate 61% or more of their applications to a private cloud environment, while only 6% of companies will do the same on a public cloud service.
Slow application performance (41%) is cited by enterprise IT executives as their biggest problem and also the most costly today.
Other top problems indicated by IT managers include slow time to identify the root cause of issues (24%), followed by shared resource contention within applications (18%) and multi-tenant storage contention (18%), the survey stated.
Improved application performance (26%) was rated as the highest scoring benefit expected by survey respondents when moving to the cloud.
However, most of the respondents predicted that it will take longer to pinpoint the causes of problems after applications move to the cloud (37%).
Precise executive VP Zohar Gilad said CIOs, IT managers and DBAs will need to pay close attention to application performance before and after migrations to ensure that quality of service does not suffer
"Companies should deploy processes and tools that can handle the dynamic nature of the cloud, and allow quick access to historical performance data during troubleshooting," Gilad said.
