The cloud's siren call of flexibility, scalability and reduced costs is music to many CIOs, perennially under pressure to reduce costs even as the business becomes more and more digital. But many postpone the move because they fear that performance may not live up to users' expectations, or they have heard of these sorts of problems from their peers.
"CIOs have real concerns about how the apps will perform once they are in the cloud - and how they will correct problems and manage their application assets into the future," says Paul Griffiths, Senior Director, Advanced Technology Group at Riverbed. "Our core business is developing ways to drive application performance, and we can leverage our experience and technology solutions to overcome the challenges posed by the cloud, and help clients realise the benefits they are looking for."
Griffiths says that the common pain points that bedevil the typical app migration to the cloud essentially all relate to visibility and thus the ability to identify problems and find solutions.
In planning the migration, the CIO needs a very detailed visibility of the current network and how it is used - including where users are, their applications and when they are used, and network traffic patterns. This kind of information is vital to craft a workable plan based on which groups should be moved when in order to minimise business disruption.
This visibility of the current state is also vital in designing the new network.
Once the migration is completed, the CIO faces the challenge of identifying and trouble-shooting performance issues. The reason for degraded application performance could be specific to a user, a desktop or an office, or could be related to the network or even within the cloud itself.
"There's no doubt that IT loses visibility and thus control over much of the network environment. Because it cannot see where or what the problem is, it cannot provide a solution," remarks Griffiths. "Because the application is physically much further from users than it was in the corporate data centre, many (but not all) performance issues relate to the network - WAN and Internet - that connects users to the cloud."
Then there's the question of service-level agreements (SLAs). Although cloud providers like Microsoft offer SLAs, these will never cover beyond the cloud because, of course, the provider has no control over what happens on public or private networks.
"This is the difficulty of identifying and troubleshooting performance issues from another angle - the corporate IT department bears the ultimate responsibility but it cannot see enough to understand where the bottlenecks are," Griffiths says.
Riverbed's application performance platform has been created to solve these and other challenges related to application performance. Thus, IT departments can get the detailed visibility needed to plan the migration, including a comprehensive audit that reveals what applications each employee uses, how they connect to them, and whether there are any dependencies between applications, all of which could impact on the migration plan.
Post-migration, they get the same level of visibility and control to monitor and manage the new network.
As noted above, many performance challenges can be traced to the network which will now include the Internet, an area over which the CIO has no control. This is where the IT department needs the ability to dynamically select alternate network paths to avoid outages or relieve congestion across today's hybrid networks. What's also useful is being able to accelerate application performance, while transmitting less data. "This optimisation will not only enhance the user experience, but it also frees up network bandwidth and so can be used in tandem with path selection and other SDWAN capabilities to fine-tune the network performance in real time. Finally a monitoring function will ensure that the service provider is honouring its SLAs.
"Everything ultimately hinges on visibility: the migration can be properly planned, and the final state optimised to ensure an improved experience for users, with full control for the IT team at the same time as the business realising all the benefits of a cloud first strategy," concludes Griffiths.
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