Do cloud providers hide performance problems?

The majority of IT professionals (79%) believe that typical service level agreements (SLAs) built around availability are too simplistic and fail to address the risks of moving and managing applications into the cloud.

That's according to Compuware Corporation, who released the findings of a global survey of 740 senior IT professionals’ concerns about cloud computing adoption.

Additionally, 63% of respondents indicated there is a need for more meaningful and granular SLA metrics that are geared towards ensuring the continuous delivery of a high quality end-user experience.

“Entrusting mission critical business applications that drive revenue and critical business processes require ultimate trust and accountability in a cloud provider,” says Michael Masterson, Director of Cloud Solutions for Compuware APM’s business unit.

“Vanity metrics like simple uptime do not capture well-known issues such as ‘noisy neighbours,’ which can be detrimental to traditional enterprise apps that were not designed to scale and fail horizontally.

"APM is no longer optional; and as customers bet on the cloud, they must demand granular SLA assurances around performance and rapid problem resolution.”

When asked which metrics they would most like to see as part of their SLAs with cloud service providers, the top three responses were:

1. Response time and quality for every end user interaction;

2. Availability based on deep continuous monitoring; and

3. Real-time SLA reporting.

The findings also revealed that nearly three quarters (73%) of businesses believe their cloud providers could be hiding problems at an infrastructure or platform level that impact on the performance of applications.

While 60% of respondents expressed further anxiety that other, co-located tenants consuming difficult to partition resources impact their own workload performance.

“Having handed over control to cloud providers, IT departments have lost much of their ability to troubleshoot and fine-tune IT services,” adds Thomas Mendel, Managing Director, Research in Action.

“This doesn’t just make it tricky to optimise performance for end-users, but it can also severely affect the bottom line.

"When faced with new IT challenges and risks, businesses can’t afford to waste time playing the blame game when something goes wrong.

"Having the ability to work with their cloud provider to quickly get to the heart of the issue and resolve the matter is essential to alleviate risk and hindrances while moving investment to the cloud.”

Additional findings from the study also showed that:

· 75% of IT professionals fear that the loss of control could prevent them from fully optimising their application and reduce their return on investment from the cloud.

· The limited visibility into infrastructure was also found to be adding new risk and cost, with 62% of businesses claiming that they find it harder to troubleshoot problems in the cloud.

Do cloud providers hide performance problems?