Growing Numbers of Cloud Apps Still Face Performance Challenge

Are IT teams equipped to fully embrace cloud apps and services?
Patrick Carey

The good news - Cloud apps and services continue to gain traction in enterprises with both business users and IT departments. The trend is being driven by much more than cost savings too.

The bad - Big obstacles still remain including a lack of confidence about service performance and availability, a lack of management tools and continuing concerns about data security.

These observations come from a recent survey of over 200 business executives and IT managers in North America to better understand their current and planned use of cloud-based applications and services, the drivers behind cloud adoption, and the obstacles that stand in their way. Some of the highlights include:

■ Both Businesses and IT Teams Plan to Use Cloud Apps

Both business and IT users surveyed indicated a major role for both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) models in their future IT plans. To date, much of the usage of cloud apps has been driven by business users.

■ IaaS Dominates Today, But SaaS Adoption is Catching Up

While IaaS offerings like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure represent a larger share of the cloud pie today, SaaS offerings are gaining ground. This includes expanding the use of established SaaS applications like Salesforce.com as well as deploying newer offerings such as Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps and Dropbox as core applications for most employees.

■ Cloud Use is Being Driven by More Than Cost Savings

The CapEx and OpEx benefits of cloud services are clearly understood and well documented, but adoption today is being driven by the operational agility and flexibility advantages more so than the cost benefits. The ability to deploy new services quickly and reconfigure them easily as the needs of the business change is becoming critical.

■ As Cloud Adoption Gains, IT Roles and Responsibilities Shift

The requirements in a cloud-based environment shift from managing apps and supporting infrastructure to coordinating and ensuring the availability of the services business users need to do their jobs. The challenge is how to manage and assure app service levels and data security for users when they don't have the same control over cloud-based services that they have over on-premise applications.

■ Security Concerns and Lack of IT Visibility Hamper Adoption

The biggest obstacles to cloud adoption are security concerns and a lack of confidence in app/service performance and availability. Related to this, over 40% of respondents indicate that their IT team has no tools to monitor and manage their cloud apps. Just 17% of respondents feel like their existing tools do a good job managing and monitoring their cloud-based apps.

What Should We Take From This?

It's no surprise that data security remains a primary concern with cloud deployments. Although the major service providers implement security measures that are more sophisticated than those in place within most business datacenters, businesses remain wary of the risks of storing their sensitive data in the cloud.

What may be surprising to the readers of APMdigest is the concern over cloud app performance and availability and the lack of good cloud management tools.

IT teams adopting cloud apps often find themselves in a challenging position today. Their users and business management still look to them to "own" application availability and performance even though they no longer own the application hosting environment. Unfortunately, the tools they use to manage their on-premise applications don't give them the same visibility and control in the cloud. This issue is further highlighted by the fact that nearly two-thirds of respondents indicate that their IT team either has no tools to monitor and manage their cloud apps or they simply rely on whatever health dashboard is available from their cloud service providers.

This data suggests a significant gap in systems management. Traditional tools, which have relied on direct access to servers, network equipment, log files, and APIs, are unable to effectively support cloud apps and services that do not expose those interfaces. Network management tools address part of the problem by focusing on network health, but they too are often limited in their visibility outside the company firewall and generally unable to provide insight into application/service health.

When asked how well the tools they use today address their cloud app monitoring and management needs, over 75% of the respondents indicated that they are at best, ambivalent about the tools. And more respondents feel their tools are not up to the task than feel they are.

Most mature systems management and monitoring solutions on the market today have evolved alongside the on-premise applications, operating systems, server and network infrastructure they have been used to manage. Organizations are now realizing how profoundly a cloud-centric IT architecture differs from their legacy on-premise architectures and with that how different their management and monitoring needs will be going forward. This is the key to driving cloud adoption in the enterprise and enabling businesses to take full advantage of all it has to offer.

Patrick Carey is VP Product Management & Marketing at Exoprise.

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Growing Numbers of Cloud Apps Still Face Performance Challenge

Are IT teams equipped to fully embrace cloud apps and services?
Patrick Carey

The good news - Cloud apps and services continue to gain traction in enterprises with both business users and IT departments. The trend is being driven by much more than cost savings too.

The bad - Big obstacles still remain including a lack of confidence about service performance and availability, a lack of management tools and continuing concerns about data security.

These observations come from a recent survey of over 200 business executives and IT managers in North America to better understand their current and planned use of cloud-based applications and services, the drivers behind cloud adoption, and the obstacles that stand in their way. Some of the highlights include:

■ Both Businesses and IT Teams Plan to Use Cloud Apps

Both business and IT users surveyed indicated a major role for both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) models in their future IT plans. To date, much of the usage of cloud apps has been driven by business users.

■ IaaS Dominates Today, But SaaS Adoption is Catching Up

While IaaS offerings like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure represent a larger share of the cloud pie today, SaaS offerings are gaining ground. This includes expanding the use of established SaaS applications like Salesforce.com as well as deploying newer offerings such as Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps and Dropbox as core applications for most employees.

■ Cloud Use is Being Driven by More Than Cost Savings

The CapEx and OpEx benefits of cloud services are clearly understood and well documented, but adoption today is being driven by the operational agility and flexibility advantages more so than the cost benefits. The ability to deploy new services quickly and reconfigure them easily as the needs of the business change is becoming critical.

■ As Cloud Adoption Gains, IT Roles and Responsibilities Shift

The requirements in a cloud-based environment shift from managing apps and supporting infrastructure to coordinating and ensuring the availability of the services business users need to do their jobs. The challenge is how to manage and assure app service levels and data security for users when they don't have the same control over cloud-based services that they have over on-premise applications.

■ Security Concerns and Lack of IT Visibility Hamper Adoption

The biggest obstacles to cloud adoption are security concerns and a lack of confidence in app/service performance and availability. Related to this, over 40% of respondents indicate that their IT team has no tools to monitor and manage their cloud apps. Just 17% of respondents feel like their existing tools do a good job managing and monitoring their cloud-based apps.

What Should We Take From This?

It's no surprise that data security remains a primary concern with cloud deployments. Although the major service providers implement security measures that are more sophisticated than those in place within most business datacenters, businesses remain wary of the risks of storing their sensitive data in the cloud.

What may be surprising to the readers of APMdigest is the concern over cloud app performance and availability and the lack of good cloud management tools.

IT teams adopting cloud apps often find themselves in a challenging position today. Their users and business management still look to them to "own" application availability and performance even though they no longer own the application hosting environment. Unfortunately, the tools they use to manage their on-premise applications don't give them the same visibility and control in the cloud. This issue is further highlighted by the fact that nearly two-thirds of respondents indicate that their IT team either has no tools to monitor and manage their cloud apps or they simply rely on whatever health dashboard is available from their cloud service providers.

This data suggests a significant gap in systems management. Traditional tools, which have relied on direct access to servers, network equipment, log files, and APIs, are unable to effectively support cloud apps and services that do not expose those interfaces. Network management tools address part of the problem by focusing on network health, but they too are often limited in their visibility outside the company firewall and generally unable to provide insight into application/service health.

When asked how well the tools they use today address their cloud app monitoring and management needs, over 75% of the respondents indicated that they are at best, ambivalent about the tools. And more respondents feel their tools are not up to the task than feel they are.

Most mature systems management and monitoring solutions on the market today have evolved alongside the on-premise applications, operating systems, server and network infrastructure they have been used to manage. Organizations are now realizing how profoundly a cloud-centric IT architecture differs from their legacy on-premise architectures and with that how different their management and monitoring needs will be going forward. This is the key to driving cloud adoption in the enterprise and enabling businesses to take full advantage of all it has to offer.

Patrick Carey is VP Product Management & Marketing at Exoprise.

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

Escaping Pilot Purgatory: How AI Becomes an Operational Advantage

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

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Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

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Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

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Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

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The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

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In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI Scale Is Outpacing Infrastructure - and IT Leaders Are Running Out of Time

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.