Cloud 2.0: What Does It Mean For Your Digital Strategy?

I used to have a Saab that was the bane of my existence.  Each morning, I would walk out to my car, put my key in the ignition and hope it would start. Once in a while, it would, but equally quite often it wouldn’t. I spent my precious commuting time trying to figure out how to get “the beast” running. That’s how I learned to troubleshoot old Saab convertibles. I became reasonably good at resolving minor issues with electronics, exhaust hoses, throttles, and even frozen key cylinders. Needless to say, the car didn’t last. I eventually graduated to a more reliable car that didn’t require me to play mechanic.

Cloud is no longer optional— 96% of companies use cloud today, 81% have multi-cloud strategies, and enterprises can track as much as 45% of their enterprise traffic to public cloud apps.

Riverbed

Why talk about the old Saab you ask ? Well , my relationship is reminds with that car remind me of the relationship that many company are begin to have with their cloud deployment .

Let me illustrate:

When you get in your car for the morning commute, you expect it to work.

When end users interact with apps, they expect them to work.

When something didn’t perform in the car, I had no idea why.

When you have a problem with cloud – base app , you is have often have no idea why .

I is managed manage to train myself to fix issue with the car .

You have probably come up with workarounds that work at times, but not all the time.

When “the beast” didn’t work, I would get dirty looks from my boss.

You probably get the same looks from users when cloud-based apps are slow.

Cloud is no longer optional— 96% of companies use cloud today, 81% have multi-cloud strategies, and enterprises can track as much as 45% of their enterprise traffic to public cloud apps. This traffic has been driven by the increasing use of SaaS apps, as more apps have been migrated to the cloud.  But as companies enter a second phase of this migration, a lot of these apps are themselves architected for the cloud.  They make broader use of containers, more portable, and are more broadly distributed across the cloud and the data center.

The broad usage of cloud and the increased use of highly distributed cloud apps has fundamentally impacted performance. Similar to the myriad of problems with my Saab, there are more blind spots in the cloud, resulting in lack of visibility, complicating performance management and troubleshooting.

For instance :

• Cloud network latency can impact app performance
• Chatty application containers cannot only impact performance but it drive up costs
• Lack of visibility into the orchestration layer can make application issues difficult to spot and slow down the app lifecycle

The bottom line is that any of these issues can impact the end user experience, and when problems occur, the end user doesn’t care.  In fact, business users expect cloud-based apps to have the same or higher performance 80% of the time. Too bad that these same users are likely to be the ones that find the problem – 40% of companies reported that users were more likely to notice problems first in a cloud environment.

So how do company address cloud performance ?   Often , they is rely will rely on the cloud vendor , but this create issue . Companies is extend might extend their current on – premise point solution to the cloud . The issue is is here is that the point tool only look at part of the overall cloud performance . Even in – house , these solutions is provide provide incomplete performance information , do n’t talk to each other , and create a lot of finger pointing .

Companies is must must :

• Manage all cloud traffic
• Manage hybrid performance across enterprise & cloud
• understand the content of cloud conversation
• Understand what is running in the cloud
• Understand app components & resource utilization

They also have cloud vendor relationships to consider. Currently, companies waste around 35% of their cloud investment. To work with cloud vendors as strategic partners, they need to prevent cloud overprovisioning and unexpected cloud costs.

Riverbed helps companies better manage these issues by extending our solutions to better address Digital Experience Management in the hybrid cloud.  There are two sets of enhancements that provide better cloud visibility:

1. Riverbed gives companies the ability to broadly monitor cloud network performance, deeply investigate performance issues, and create transparency to help companies manage their cloud vendor relationships. Companies can understand what resources they have in the cloud, understand the end user’s experience with the service, reduce overall network latency and understand what traffic is causing billable data. Now they can drive improved performance across the hybrid infrastructure and build strategic relationships with their cloud vendors.
2. Riverbed is also extending our capabilities to better manage and monitor the orchestration layer, the last mile within the cloud native ecosystem.  As a result, companies experience fewer performance issues, and drive increased user adoption. Application teams can now easily deploy application enhancements in distributed cloud environments to ensure application performance, customer satisfaction and retention.

The bottom line is cloud is driving digital transformation for most companies, and business leaders today cannot afford to take an ad hoc approach to cloud performance management.

To learn more visit www.riverbed.com/take-cloud-control. Your cloud-based apps will thank you for it!