Improved Service Availability, Scalability Drive Cloud Adoption

According to a survey of 94 network engineers, IT managers, and executives attending Interop conducted by Network Instruments, migrating to cloud computing continues to be popular, growing 20 percent since last year’s survey.

In its fifth annual survey, respondents said their biggest benefit came from “increased application availability and scalability.”

Among the survey’s results:

• Cloud computing services are running on organization networks according to 61 percent of respondents. Half of these respondents implemented “some form of software-as-a-service (SaaS)” such as Salesforce.com or Google Apps, a gain of 10 percent over last year’s SaaS adoption figure.

• Half (50 percent) of respondents have private clouds, a 21 percent increase that was the largest gain among all survey answers.

• Platform-as-a-service is a small but still significant service; 21 percent of respondents said they “rely on some form of platform as a service (PaaS) such as Microsoft Azure and Salesforce Force,” according to a Network Instruments release.

• Respondents expect to run 38 percent of their applications in the cloud by the middle of this year, up from 21 percent for the same period last year.

• Cloud services provided 61 percent of respondents with improved application availability, and 4 percent reported availability declined. Just over half (52 percent) reported an improved end-user experience; 4 percent said it was worse. Over half (Network Instruments doesn’t give the percent) said they were better able to scale applications thanks to cloud computing.

• On the down side, 60 percent said their ability to troubleshoot problems remained the same or was worse after their cloud migration. More than half (52 percent) noted that their ability to monitor cloud performance declined or remained steady.

In its announcement, Network Instruments makes this caveat from Brad Reinboldt, senior product manager at the company. “Although cloud adopters have reported improvements in application availability and cost savings. These improvements aren’t sustainable in the long run without appropriate monitoring tools. When trouble does hit, it falls in the lap of the organization’s network team to prove that the problem is occurring on the cloud provider’s side. Without proof, organizations will waste time finger pointing, jeopardizing any cost savings or efficiency improvements.”

-- James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ

Posted by Jim Powell on 05/11/2011