Don't Fall into the Application Performance Gap

Migrating on-premise applications to cloud-based services can save the IT department the large amounts of time and money it used to devote to maintaining and upgrading the IT infrastructure. However, as companies create a hybrid IT architecture of on premise and cloud-based applications, a new problem appears: the application performance gap. New research finds users are growing increasingly frustrated by applications performing below their expectations, and place the blame for their frustrations on IT’s shoulders.

The Riverbed (News - Alert) Global Application Performance Survey 2015 finds that 98 percent of executives agree that optimal enterprise application performance is critical to achieving optimal business performance. And yet, 89 percent of executives say the poor performance of enterprise applications has negatively impacted their work on a regular basis. 58 percent say it impacts their work at least weekly, and 36 percent say it affects them every day.

Survey respondents cite this performance gap as a frequent cause of lost employee productivity, which in turn leads to a significant and negative impact on the overall business. According to these executives, the most common consequences are:

• Dissatisfied clients or customers (41 percent)
• Contract delays (40 percent)
• Missed critical deadlines (35 percent)
• Lost clients or customers (33 percent)
• A negative impact on the brand (32 percent)

The downside of hybrid IT

A hybrid architecture forces IT to manage the expectations of highly mobile users who are scattered across multiple locations and all want to access apps and data that reside in the data center and in the cloud. Managing this complex environment is more difficult than ever, but that fact seems to be lost on the users.

Globally, 71 percent of survey respondents said they have frequently felt “in the dark” about why their enterprise applications are running slowly. Executives can then compound the problem by trying to work around it. Thirty-seven percent 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.” Others have expressed frustration to colleagues (34 percent), taken an extended lunch (29 percent), used slow or down apps as an excuse for missing a deadline (26 percent), and even left work early (26 percent).

Closing the gap

In order to close the performance gap, having a clear line of sight into how the apps are performing – and how the end-user experience is being impacted – has also become a business imperative. A majority of the executives surveyed agree that better visibility by IT staff into application performance would result in increased productivity (56 percent), improved customer service (54 percent), improved product quality (49 percent), improved employee engagement (46 percent) and increased revenue (43 percent).

The first step to achieving that visibility is determining the types of applications, number of devices and traffic sources on running on network. This requires implementing a solution that provides multiple unified views of the network, application traffic, and actual end-user experience, and also conducts its own discovery, dependency mapping, and behavioral analysis.

Next, IT can focus on ensuring consistent application performance by addressing three key requirements:

1.Achieving visibility into layers of virtualization: Virtualization introduces layers of abstraction that can hide the details of what’s happening to an application. As physical systems get carved up into logical units, information about the physical system alone is insufficient. IT needs the ability to isolate performance issues within virtualized and physical environments.

2.Application performance infrastructure virtualization: Pervasive virtualization is at the foundation of the software-defined data center. This improves utilization and reduces capital and operating costs. To maximize efficiency across the data center, implement virtual application delivery controllers, storage delivery controllers, WAN optimization controllers, and other application performance infrastructure.

3.Creating API access to application performance infrastructure: In a software-defined data center, infrastructure is accessible and configurable through lines of code. That requires all data center components, including application performance infrastructure, to have APIs. APIs allow programmers to define what services are needed in their code, as well as integrate infrastructure with orchestration systems.

Companies may even want to consider creating a new competency in IT: The Performance Management Center, dedicated to providing visibility into the different apps and the end user experience. This will require using sophisticated tools to understand what’s happening across the hybrid IT ecosystem, from the data center to cloud-based applications. An important additional benefit will be hastening IT’s evolution from the traditional control model to a more modern and effective partnership with the other business units that their leaders are sure to welcome.

Steve Brar is the Director of Platform & Solutions Marketing for Riverbed. In this role, he leads the marketing strategy for Riverbed's Application Performance Platform and cross-portfolio solutions. Steve has been with Riverbed since 2014. Prior to joining Riverbed, Steve led product marketing for HP's campus networking product lines. At HP he held engineering, product management roles, and product marketing roles. He has more than 12 years of experience in the networking industry. Steve graduated with a BS in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of California, Davis. He is currently based in San Francisco, California.