Survey: Enterprise Trends in Cloud, Virtualization Adoption 
A survey released this month finds that while at least one-third of enterprises have migrated, or plan to migrate, front office and back office on-premise applications, many firms remain concerned about the management and performance of migrated apps. IDN speaks with an exec from Precise Software, sponsor of the survey.
A survey released this month finds that while at least one-third of enterprises have migrated, or plan to migrate, front office and back office on-premise applications, many firms remain concerned about the management and performance of migrated apps.
Among the survey findings are:
- Several major categories of applications have been moved to a virtualized or cloud environment. Among them: e-mail and collaboration systems (39%, IT management (33%) sales and marketing (20%), finance/HR/ERP (21%), and security (13%).
- By 2012, 33% of respondents say they will move finance/ERP /HR applications to the cloud. Other applications on the schedule to be migrated include e-mail and collaboration software (23%) and IT management applications (21%).
- Over time, more than one-third of respondents (37%) say they will migrate 61% or more of their applications to private cloud environments. This compared to only 6% of firms who plan to migrate to or use public cloud services.
The survey was released by Precise Software, a provider of transaction performance management solutions. IDN spoke with Zohar Gilad, Precise executive vice president about the findings, and some of the lingering concerns the survey found over migrating to cloud and virtualized platforms.
“There is no doubt about it. Our survey found people are aggressive on the infrastructure side for two main reasons. Those are cost cuttings and agility, which is the ability to provision IT or users in minutes, as opposed to days or months,” Gilad told IDN.
"Before IT fully embraces the cloud, they want better ways to manage the transition and ensure that performance won’t degrade."
Zohar Gilad
Executive Vice President
Precise Software
Low cost and high agility also blend to create a third benefit Gilad added. “While users may not think of this at first, once you cut the cost and time of provisioning, you also are able to drive innovation,” he said. “So, if you have an idea for a new application, you can start with very little cost or complexity.”
However, for all the benefits and bullish plans to use virtualization or private clouds, the survey also found some concerns among IT managers. The survey listed these top application concerns:
Slow performance (41%),
Difficulty in indentifying root causes of problems (24%)
Inter-application shared resource contention (18%)
Multi-tenant storage contention (18%).
“Our survey also found that sometimes the cloud can be a double-edged sword, because IT feels it can limit visibility into problems or make it more complicated to solve it,” Gilad told IDN. He provided a familiar example. “An IT team may be working on a problem in the morning, where they are working with a clustered application with many instances. But, in the afternoon, some VMs may not exist anymore, so how do you fix that problem?” he asked. “When a problem occurs, virtualization is the enemy of visibility.”
Dynamic provisioning and virtualized assets can make it difficult to troubleshoot a problem across servers, VMs, or application instances.
For this reason, IT remains reluctant to move its mission-critical applications onto cloud or virtualization platforms, Gilad said. “They are afraid these systems may run slower than before. Also, before IT fully embraces the cloud, they want better ways to manage the transition and ensure that performance won’t degrade.”
Precise provides infrastructure monitors and performance monitors designed to provide IT managers control, management and visibility, Gilad said. The company’s offerings can monitor all user transactions, instances and VMs for every application. All data is kept in a database to enable correlations across all end-to-end virtualized and legacy resources.
“We call this hybrid infrastructure management,” which Gilad said allows IT to manage applications across infrastructure, application and database layers, as well as end-to-end. “Traditional enterprise management offerings don’t manage virtualized infrastructures as well because they can’t cope with the highly dynamic flux of change there, Gilad added.
