Jane McCallion | Cloudpro
Move to the cloud seen as vital for business, but some challenges still remain, says Compuware
A quarter of CIOs view cloud infrastructure and virtualisation as their current top investment priorities, research suggests.
The investigation, carried out by Research in Action on behalf of software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider Compuware, also found that CIOs believe end-to-end performance visibility and robust service level agreements (SLAs) as key to achieving good return on investment from cloud computing.
Over the next five years, full integration of public, hybrid and private cloud will be the single most important priority for CIOs, with 34 per cent of the 200-plus respondents surveyed saying it was their primary focus between now and 2017.
Michael Allen, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) strategic director at Compuware told Cloud Pro: “Whenever we commission independent studies it is to validate signals in the market that we feel are happening and to get a third-party perspective and validation. I also think the data also becomes very interesting to our customers to validate … if they are on the right track with their peers.”
The survey also highlights some of the challenges facing those wishing to implement cloud, Allen claimed.
The two main difficulties for IT departments to overcome when looking to move to the cloud are maintaining the same level of service experienced as when applications were delivered internally and accountability when things do go wrong, according to Allen.
“[We asked] ‘What’s your number one investment area in the performance management stakes?’ and 19 per cent said end-to-end SLAs. With cloud that becomes more challenging because no longer are you monitoring assets in your datacentre,” he added.
It is perhaps then no surprise that, over the next five years, end-to-end SLAs are said to be the number one area for investment with regards to performance management.
“What that is saying is it is no longer enough to monitor how well an application is performing and available in the cloud, but it is absolutely critical to be able to correlate those metrics of health around an application for end users with the business impact of it,” Allen said.
