CIOs need to worry about performance and not security in the cloud

Cloud Computing is rapidly becoming the platform of choice for collaboration and application management. And with India becoming one of the fastest growing economies today, businesses here both small and large are beginning to understand and appreciate the benefits of the cloud. Though the security concerns in the cloud continue to loom over the CIO’s mind, there is a more important issue that needs to be dealt with and that is performance.

According to Nick Evered – Regional VP, Asia and India, Compuware, security issues in the cloud can be dealt with, however it is the performance of the applications that businesses need to concentrate more on. The reason being, modern computing has become very complex with the introduction of cloud, content management, third-party applications, etc.

Traditionally, to make sure applications perform at their optimum, businesses ensure their backend systems such as database, network, applications, etc were up and running. However, according to Evered, just this one approach is not enough. He adds that it is important that businesses take a look at their systems from the front end as well. This is because as the access to applications is becoming more and more device agnostic, it is necessary that the end user be able to access the application from any device or anywhere in the world and yet gets the optimum performance.

Evered explains this with an example, there are times a user cannot access his bank account online, in spite of the bank’s systems working at their optimum. This probably happens because as the user tries accessing his account from a location which is further away from the bank’s datacenter, the response time tends to increase.

It is important to tackle this issue because according to studies, only 30 percent of the customers would actually complain to bank about this, while the remaining 70 percent would move to a different bank. Therefore, it is necessary to have a front end approach along with the back-end one. Apparently, Compuware provides solutions to cater to both these needs. The Vantage set of products are used to monitor systems inside the firewall such as server management, application management, etc, while Gomez enables monitoring from outside the firewall.

In addition to these solutions, Compuware has introduced CloudSleuth, a portal which uses Gomez technology that monitors the performance of various companies in the cloud computing environment, and provides information on the cloud’s performance. Evered said, as the adoption of cloud increases and more and more people transact online applications, such CloudSleuth will enable cloud providers to better understand on how they can improve their system performance.