Performance Concerns Dog Cloud Computing Adoption

While there are more applications than ever moving onto virtual servers that one day will be part of private cloud computing, a new survey from Precise Software, a provider of transaction-processing management software, indicates that the IT organizations driving these projects still have more than a few concerns about the performance of these applications in these environments.

The survey of 88 IT organizations finds that IT organizations that embrace virtualization and cloud computing are not only concerned about performance, but also how long it will take to identify problems and contention issues that will arise because applications are sharing more IT infrastructure than ever. That said, the paradox is that over one-quarter of them said they expect the biggest benefit of virtualization and cloud computing will be improved performance, which may reflect an acknowledgement that most of these applications are now running on aging IT infrastructure.

Zohar Gilad, executive vice president for Precise, says that when it comes to cloud computing, specifically, that vast majority of customers are focused on building private clouds because they have no real visibility into public cloud computing services, which they don’t consider ready to run mission-critical enterprise applications.

To make matters worse, Gilad notes that the advent of virtualization and cloud computing has increased the complexity of managing enterprise IT, which makes IT organizations less inclined to try to manage remote servers running in a third-party data center.

While public cloud computing services will play a larger role in enterprise IT in the years ahead, it’s starting to become clear that the cloud computing age is initially going to be a phenomenon that takes place inside a data center managed by a local IT organization.

Click through for results of a cloud survey conducted by Precise Software.

There is no firm consensus yet.

Less enthusiasm for the public cloud.

Email and IT management top the list.

More mission-critical applications start to make the list.

Performance is always an issue.

And appears likely to remain so for a while.