Wimpie van Rensburg, Country Manager Sub Saharan Africa, Riverbed Technology
Reports show businesses of all sizes are making the move to the cloud. As well as improving cost effectiveness, mobility and scalability, cloud applications make it easier for IT departments to maintain all the systems and applications housed within data centres.
However, Riverbed’s Global Application Performance Survey 2015 shows that most organisations experience frustrating performance slowdowns with 98 per cent of executives agreeing that enterprise application performance is critical to achieving optimal business performance.
Nonetheless, 89 per cent say the poor performance of enterprise applications has negatively impacted their work on a weekly (58 per cent), and even daily (36 per cent) basis. As a result, a significant performance gap is created between the needs and expectations of the business and IT’s ability to deliver. IT is then in the line of fire for hindering business productivity, leading to frustrated customers, low employee morale, damage to a brand’s reputation and lost revenue. What is the cause the application performance gap and how can IT close it?
The ups and downs of app performance
Despite the frustrations caused by poor performance, businesses are migrating an increasing number of apps to the cloud. Nearly all (96 per cent) of respondents use cloud-based enterprise applications in their work, and 84 per cent say their company’s use of cloud-based enterprise applications will increase over the next two years.
The reason for this is that when applications deliver the expected user experience, organisations see improvements in employee productivity (51 per cent), time savings (50 per cent), cost savings (47 per cent), and customer satisfaction (43 per cent) as well as faster delivery of products to market (33 per cent). Consequently, executives are willing to sacrifice a lot for applications to work at peak performance at all times. In fact, 33 per cent would give up their lunch break, while others would give up a portion of their programme budget (32 per cent), caffeine (29 per cent), and even chocolate (27 per cent).
However, consistently poor performance destroys those benefits. Survey respondents report that when an app is slow, crashes or is not available, the resulting productivity loss creates a domino effect that impacts the company’s bottom line, including dissatisfied clients or customers (41 per cent), contract delays (40 per cent), missed critical deadlines (35 per cent), lost clients or customers (33 per cent) and negative impact on brand (32 per cent).
The issue of poor visibility
Businesses are not only storing information in the cloud as well as on local systems – creating what are known as hybrid environments – but they are also enabling local and remote employees to access that data from an increasing number of connected devices, including smartphones, laptops and tablets.
As a result, monitoring the performance of all the applications and systems that run across hybrid networks has become more and more difficult, costly and time-consuming for IT. Users expect anytime, anywhere access to applications, and expect performance levels to remain high. When this isn’t so, users feel frustrated and confused. Globally, 71 per cent of our survey respondents said they have frequently felt “in the dark” about why their enterprise applications are running slowly.
Executives can then add to the problem by trying to work around it. Thirty seven per cent of respondents admit they have used unsupported apps when corporate apps run slowly or stop working altogether, thus adding to infrastructure complexity with more “shadow IT.”
Closing the gap
A majority of the executives surveyed agree that better visibility by IT staff into application performance would close the application performance gap, resulting in improved productivity (56 per cent), customer service (54 per cent), product quality (49 per cent), employee engagement (46 per cent) and revenue (43 per cent).
IT needs end-to-end, real-time visibility across the entire network and all the applications running on it. This enables IT to quickly locate what is causing a performance delay and fix it before users experience a disruption to their work.
To deliver superior application performance in today’s hybrid environments, enterprises need a comprehensive solution that provides end-to-end application visibility, optimisation and control.
Organisations should also follow these four steps before migrating their applications to the cloud:
Understand performance constraints: Network and application performance monitoring solutions enable IT to quickly identify and address any potential performance limitations.
Optimise network constraints: Determine how to overcome potential bottlenecks such as distance, latency, loss and disconnections. These often are the largest performance constraint in today’s cloud-centric global economy.
Identify inefficiencies: Not all apps are of equal importance, and therefore, not all require IT to allocate equal amounts of bandwidth. IT should determine whether it’s over-provisioning (and wasting) bandwidth to non-critical applications, and eliminate them.
Implement a real-time performance dashboard: Implementing a real-time performance dashboard with advanced analytics enables IT to quickly detect and remedy issues.
As organisations migrate their on-premise applications to the cloud, and as user’s expectations for optimal performance continue to grow, closing the application performance gap is taking centre stage. However, if IT cannot stay in control and move quickly to resolve application performance issues, the gap will remain open. Providing a clear view of how all apps are performing, whether they are on-premise or in the cloud can ensure that IT stays on top of network blockages and identify data trends that can lead to a bigger disaster down the road.
By Wimpie van Rensburg, Country Manager for Sub-Saharan Africa at Riverbed Technology