Cloud computing is driving a fundamental shift in the way organizations build, deploy and use applications, and it’s raising expectations on how quickly and cost-effectively new IT functionality can be made available to the business. And even though the delivery chain for these “borderless applications” now crosses organizational and geographic boundaries, users will still expect the applications to perform well, and they will hold IT accountable if they don’t. For its part, IT is faced with managing an increasingly complex and diverse delivery chain, consisting of perhaps dozens of service and content providers spread around the world.
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Cloud Computing:
Why Managing Performance Matters
www.gomez.comExecutive Summary:
Cloud computing is driving a fundamental shift in the way organizations build, deploy and use applications, and it's raising expectations on how quickly and cost-effectively new IT functionality can be made available to the business. And even though the delivery chain for these "borderless applications" now crosses organizational and geographic boundaries, users will still expect the applications to perform well, and they will hold IT accountable if they don't. For its part, IT is faced with managing an increasingly complex and diverse delivery chain, consisting of perhaps dozens of service and content providers spread around the worldThe challenge for IT is to meet the business expectation of faster delivery of new functionality, while at the same time maintaining end-to-end visibility and control of application performance and availability across a rapidly growing network of third-party service providers. Most current Application Performance Management (APM) solutions provide a narrow, compartmentalized view, showing only individual components of the delivery chain, with little or no integration between the components. However, customers do not want different ways to manage application performance levels from different providers (or in some cases, no way) - they require a single end-to-end view across the entire Web application delivery chain, regardless of its physical, virtual or cloud attributes. The only way to effectively meet these customer requirements is to provide a single integrated solution that tests, monitors and manages application performance from the only perspective which really matters: the end user's.
Cloud computing 101:
Cloud computing provides on-demand, real-time network access to shared resources that can be physically located anywhere across the globe. From an enterprise point of view, it represents a fundamental shift in the way to acquire and implement new services (computing power, storage, software, etc.) to support the business. Instead of internally developed, monolithic systems, or lengthy and costly implementations of customized third-party business solutions, cloud computing provides an agile and flexible environment with shorter solution implementation cycles and much lower initial cost. (A detailed description of cloud computing has been produced by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) - see Appendix A.)The business benefits of cloud computing include lower IT costs - new hardware and software functionality is acquired on a metered-service basis rather than through capital expenditure - and increased business agility-application enhancements to support changing business needs no longer rely on internally developed or customized third-party software. Also, since cloud applications are inherently Web- and Internet-based, enterprises can quickly and easily extend new functionality to customers via their Web sites.As an example, consider a common financial application such as mortgage loan pre-approval. As a legacy application, the client-based software contains all the business logic necessary to guide the customer service representative (CSR) through the pre-approval process. Several steps may require manual intervention - accessing property tax records, FEMA data and credit history - because the information does not exist inside the enterprise and can change very quickly. The net result is either a delay in pre-approval, or an inaccurate estimate of closing and servicing costs to the customer, both of which can result in lost business. Provided that the legacy application uses a modern architecture (.NET for instance), it is relatively straightforward to add various Web (cloud) services to the application to access the missing information, resulting in faster (and more accurate) decision making.
WHITEPAPER - C l o u d C o m p u t i n g : W h y M a n a g i n g P e r f o r m a n c e M at t e r s 2Existing enterprise applications that have been upgraded with cloud-based services are commonly known as "composite applications." They offer a "best of both worlds" approach to the business: They protect the significant investment in existing software, but they also provide a rapid, relatively inexpensive way to add functionality to meet changing business needs. Additionally, with a browser-based use... [download for more]
