Ensuring Cloud Migration Success

Shifting applications to the cloud has become an increasingly important strategy for businesses looking to improve IT efficiencies while reducing CapEx and OpEx costs. In its recent “Predictions 2021” report, Forrester Research predicts the global public cloud infrastructure market will grow 35 percent to $120 billion in 2021 as the cloud continues to play a huge role in businesses’ recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

But as enterprises begin to lift and shift applications to public cloud platforms, end users must have reliable access and high performance during and after those application migrations. Without adequate service edge visibility, IT can find itself hard-pressed to troubleshoot and resolve issues with an unresponsive application.

This App is Too Slow!

Complaints from unhappy end users may sound like an IT problem, but the problem can have real business impact. For example, imagine a company with employees in branch and regional offices who use an application that is vital to its just-in-time supply chain model. Said company moves that app to the public cloud, and users immediately begin to complain about much slower application performance. As a result, employees are unable to keep up with inbound orders, which has the ripple effect of harming customer service and impinging on revenue due to delayed orders. In the case of this company, cloud application performance issues created significant reputational risks for the business.

Problems such as this are often compounded when troubleshooting tools used by IT provide inconclusive results. In the aforementioned example, the company’s application had a legacy design that was never meant to work over high-latency links. So, when user actions ended up being “chatty”—in other words, involving a high number of individual transactions—latency was introduced, causing the app to become slow or completely unresponsive. Unhappy users put pressure on IT to find the root cause of the problem.

Cloud Monitoring Is Key to Providing Visibility at Service Edges

Enhanced service edge visibility is crucial for IT organizations that are planning to lift and shift legacy applications to the public cloud. Advanced cloud monitoring solutions can be used to analyze application behavior, revealing the effect of additional delays in the time taken to complete multistep end-user tasks.

When business-critical application performance depends on service quality delivered by a public cloud provider that is outside traditional IT control, being able to pinpoint the root cause of latency issues is increasingly vital. Cloud monitoring can enable IT to assess how an application is performing in the cloud, and as result whether the provider is meeting negotiated service level agreements. In the end, service edge visibility will enable IT to assure that performance is acceptable and that end users are kept happy.

Learn about NETSCOUT cloud migration solutions.