Businesses Cite Pitfalls of Running Cloud-based Apps

A recent survey shows that businesses are still concerned about running their apps in the cloud, with many expressing frustration over performance issues. Commissioned by Compuware and conducted by Vanson Bourne, the survey targeted 677 businesses in North America and Europe to gauge their current and future adoption of cloud-based apps.

Many of the companies polled said that the poor performance of cloud-based apps has had a direct impact on their revenues. The survey found that the American businesses are each losing on average almost $1 million a year due to issues with their cloud-based environment, while European companies are losing on average close to a quarter of a million each per year. The loss of revenue differs between America and Europe mainly because European businesses lag behind their American counterparts in cloud adoption.

Further, the worries over cloud computing are affecting the ability of many companies to move forward. A majority 58 percent of those in North America and 57 percent in Europe said they’re slowing or hesitating on their plans to move further into the cloud as a result of performance issues.

Yet another problem centers on service level agreements and how they should be defined. A huge 94 percent of companies in North America and 84 percent of those in Europe said they feel that SLAs for cloud-based apps should be based on the actual experience of end-users, and not just on metrics offered by the cloud provider.

Relying on outside vendors to manage IT services and applications also creates challenges for internal SLAs. Among those polled, 65 percent of North American companies and 72 percent of European firms said that as cloud-based apps are offered to users over the Internet, the ability of IT to meet the SLAs agreed upon with its own customers and users is severely restricted.

As usual, the company that commissioned the survey, Compuware (News - Alert), has a vested interest in the results as it offers its own cloud management service to help companies monitor and manage their cloud-based apps. But the survey does legitimately point out some of the potential pitfalls of hopping onto the cloud, especially when it comes to SLAs.

Since the very nature of cloud computing requires that you trust the performance and availability of your IT services and applications to an outside vendor, it’s vital that certain guidelines be set. From my IT days at my former company, we used SLAs to ensure that our end-users were getting the support they needed and that the network and other IT services were being properly delivered.

But SLAs can be fuzzy. Basing them on sometimes-vague metrics rather than on actual end-user responses and experiences can easily lead to disagreements and confusion between the customer and the vendor. Ultimately, it rests on IT to negotiate the right SLAs with cloud providers to ensure that their own needs and those of their own users are being met.