Getting End-to-end Visibility into Hybrid Technology

Attributed by Nagendra Venkaswamy, Vice President for India and Saarc, Riverbed Technology

Performance gap is causing a series of problems for Indian companies, from lost revenue and customers to lower morale to negative impact on brand image.

“If a slow or unresponsive application on your mobile device or PC has ever left you feeling angry, frustrated and unproductive, you’re not alone. Business success in today’s digital age relies on application performance,” begins Nagendra Venkaswamy, Vice President for India and Saarc, Riverbed Technology. In fact, in a recent survey conducted by Riverbed on global application performance, scores of Indian executives surveyed said that application performance is critical to business performance, yet a majority (71per cent) said poor performance of applications negatively impacts their work regularly.

With apps, data and users literally everywhere, accelerated by initiatives such as Digital India, the work of optimizing and delivering great app performance has gotten much tougher for IT organizations. “But you can’t control what you can’t see. And in order to close the performance gap, having a clear line of sight into how the apps are performing – and how the end user experience is being impacted – has become a business imperative,” added Venkaswamy.

The cloud is the new normal

Almost 98 per cent of survey respondents in India use cloud-based enterprise applications in their work. 96 per cent say their company’s use of cloud-based enterprise applications will increase over the next two years. Executives identified the benefits of cloud-based enterprise apps as increased flexibility (78per cent), increased productivity (69per cent), cost savings (56per cent), increased agility (60per cent), and increased collaboration (58per cent).

That’s the good news about cloud apps. The bad news is that hybrid Information Technology contributes to the performance gap. There is an increased difficulty in getting end-to-end visibility into the complex, hybrid Information Technology architectures that result from the use of both cloud and on-premises apps.

When those applications deliver the expected user experience, companies realize improved employee productivity (54per cent), time savings (46per cent), cost savings (45per cent), improved customer satisfaction (50per cent) and faster delivery of products to market (38per cent). More than a third also credit optimal application performance with improving employee morale.

On the other hand if application performance is poor, it leads to a number of problems that impact the bottom line, such as dissatisfied clients or customers (36 per cent), contract delays (48per cent), missing critical deadlines (45per cent), lost clients or customers (42per cent) and negative impact on brand (39per cent).

So, what’s a company’s best weapon to combat application complexity? In order to close the application performance gap, we need to first understand what’s causing it.

The problem: poor visibility

Before companies began embracing cloud computing, IT ran a tight ship. All applications and systems were under its direct control in the data center. Today, even as more CIOs grow comfortable with adopting cloud-based applications, they continue to keep some sensitive data on local systems. This creates a complex and difficult to manage hybrid Information Technology environment, made even more difficult by the fact that all applications are accessible by local and remote employees on an ever-growing selection of connected devices.

Users expect anytime, anywhere access to applications, and expect performance levels to remain high, so when a problem arises, confusion reigns. 76per cent of respondents in India said they have frequently felt “in the dark” about why their enterprise applications are running slowly. This is echoed by 71per cent of businesses globally (76per cent in EMEA and 75per cent across Asia).

Even more troubling, executives can compound the problem by trying to work around it.

45 per cent percent of respondents in India admit they have used unsupported apps when corporate apps run slowly or stop working altogether, thus adding to infrastructure complexity with more “shadow IT.”

These findings should raise a red flag over the significant disconnect between IT teams and business executives, and compel companies to provide IT with complete visibility across the hybrid IT architecture.

The solution: complete visibility

End-to-end visibility into application performance is business-critical. Enabling the IT department to quickly identify the sources of performance delays is essential to fixing them. Instead of only being able to react to an issue after a user submits a help desk ticket, IT can pinpoint the sources of bottlenecks that may create performance issues, re-allocate resources, and even give priority to mission-critical applications.

• Recommendations
• Here are four steps any company should follow before migrating applications to the cloud:
• Understand performance constraints: Network and application performance monitoring solutions enables you to quickly identify and address any potential performance constraints.
• Optimize constraints: Determine how you can overcome constraints of distance, latency, loss and disconnections. These often are the largest performance constraint in today's cloud-centric global economy.
• Identify and eliminate inefficiencies: Determine whether you are over-provisioning (and wasting) bandwidth to non-critical applications.
• Monitor and optimize quality: Implementing a real-time performance dashboard with advanced analytics enables you to quickly detect and remedy issues.