The Digital Performance Company. The State of Cloud Monitoring

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1 The Digital Performance Company The State of Cloud Monitoring

2 Introduction Organizations worldwide are overwhelmingly embracing cloud services. Both public and private cloud adoption increased again this year with 96% of organizations running services in the cloud and 92% in the public cloud.¹ Growth is expected to continue at an impressive rate and by 2020, enterprises plan to run as many as 83% of their workloads in the cloud.² But at the same time cloud usage is increasing, so is its complexity. On average, enterprises use almost five clouds, with the majority relying on leading providers Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.³ And many support hybrid cloud deployments. As organizations continue to adopt cloud for improved scalability, agility, availability, and cost efficiencies, they face new management challenges such as: To better understand the state of cloud monitoring today, Riverbed Technology commissioned a global study of 333 network, infrastructure, and cloud professionals. The companies included all have 1,000 or more employees, currently use cloud services, and represent a wide range of industries and geographies. The analysis provides visibility into where organizations are today with their cloud monitoring strategies, the key challenges they re facing, and what s needed to ensure network performance while better managing costs in the cloud era How can they get the most from their cloud providers? How do they gain visibility into the cloud to ensure performance? How do they strategically plan application deployments across multiple cloud instances and in hybrid environments? 2

3 Momentum has shifted from the cloud to hybrid clouds As cloud adoption has increased, organizations have shifted their focus to embrace cloud-first strategies. With greater dependency on the cloud and cloud vendors, organizations are in the process of moving from a single vendor approach to a strategy that spans multiple providers and hybrid clouds. 74% say they use multiple cloud providers 43% have applications that span multiple cloud instances However, the adoption of cloud doesn t mean that on-premises environments are going away any time soon. Instead, organizations are integrating on-premises and cloud environments to leverage existing investments and to optimize costs and performance. Organizations view their cloud providers as strategic partners and as drivers for business success. Yet, lack of transparency makes managing these relationships and overall performance more difficult than on-prem. 73% of organizations operate a hybrid cloud environment 3

4 Cloud performance expectations are higher Consumer apps have raised overall performance expectations. Users expect their applications to be lightning fast and always available, regardless of the level of complexity. 80% 7% say business users expect cloud environments to perform the same or better than on-premises environments, even though IT has less control over these environments of business users will make an allowance for cloudbased deployments Unfortunately, IT often falls short of these heightened expectations. They are often unable to detect problems in cloud environments before they impact users due to the distributed, transitory nature of cloud ecosystems and the lack of end-to-end visibility. Likelihood that end users notice performance problems before IT does 38% On-premises 60% In cloud 13% simply aren t aware that the app runs in the cloud Existing monitoring approaches are not setting IT departments up for success. Instead, they are forced into reactive mode, causing user satisfaction to decline. 4

5 Cloud introduces blind spots Organizations have come to rely on a mix of cloud provider tools and their existing on-prem monitoring solutions. But using multiple tools creates data silos that take excessive time and human involvement to correlate. But why? The top five challenges cited are: 1. Lack of hybrid visibility (on-premises and cloud in the same tool) 2. Lack of data for troubleshooting and remediation 3. Lack of capabilities for complete network analysis 4. Lack of visibility into where cloud costs come from 92% 2x 1.7x say managing performance in the cloud is harder than on-premises find it challenging to manage the performance of cloud environments say managing costs in the cloud is harder than on-premises 5. Lack of data to hold cloud providers responsible for problems As expected, organizations with hybrid environments and multiple clouds report even greater challenges, most notably in monitoring across on-premises and cloud. 5

6 Managing cloud service providers is harder Organizations across the board report that managing cloud service providers is harder than on-prem. 1.5x say it s more difficult to manage cloud vendors In part, this is tied to a lack of visibility into their physical infrastructure and difficulty pinpointing where the problem lies. Organizations have learned that providers use a shared responsibility model: the infrastructure is the responsibility of the provider and the end-user service levels are still their responsibility. When problems do occur, organizations need visibility into end-user experience and network latency to hold cloud providers accountable. Without this visibility, organizations frequently overprovision to avoid problems and/or suffer from latency that can impact their users. 62% of companies with hybrid clouds would like to improve management of cloud vendor performance levels (SLAs) 6

7 Cost transparency remains a challenge Cost savings is a key driver of cloud adoption, yet cost transparency continues to be a challenge. Cost overages are the norm in cloud environments. 75% report unexpected cloud costs 12% say this happens frequently 64% want a unified performance management tool that can identify the drivers of cost in hybrid cloud environments. This insight will allow their organization to strategically plan cloud usage, right-size performance expectations, and reduce the likelihood of being surprised by cloud costs. The more complex the environment, the more likely organizations are to report larger-than-expected bills from their cloud providers. This taps back into a lack of visibility into a key component of vendor charges: traffic egress from cloud providers to the internet, between regions, and between availability zones. Other triggers include: Cloud instances that are not shut down once no longer used Overprovisioning Uncontrolled use of new cloud instances (shadow IT) Lack of infrastructure visibility needed to make good decisions on how to reduce costs 7

8 How are enterprises approaching cloud monitoring? The management of hybrid cloud environments requires that organizations have both the right tools in place and the right organizational structure to leverage them. However, tools for on-premises environments are largely regarded as better than those for the cloud. 52% consider tools for on-prem performance management to be better. Only 6% were highly satisfied with the cloud provider tools adopted for managing cloud network performance and cost even though 2/3 had adopted them. Companies are experimenting with different approaches to structuring their teams and onboarding new skills. They are split nearly 50/50 between those that have reorganized to have a cloud team and those that have maintained their traditional IT organization with additional responsibilities spread across groups. 44% 39% 49% have reorganized their team structure hired new talent have invested in formal training 52% 6% more than half consider on-prem tools to be better very few are happy with their adopted cloud tools 8

9 Key requirements for cloud management Cloud architects and IT operations teams say that they re looking for a single tool that will manage both cloud and on-premises performance. Those with hybrid clouds report that they would greatly benefit from the ability to: 70% 59% 57% 56% 44% monitor network performance in hybrid cloud environments understand where and why cloud costs occur understand the impact of issues on end users visibility of traffic between cloud instances integrate with existing packet solutions Unfortunately, Ops teams are limited in their ability to understand and visualize traffic in hybrid environments at the very same time cloud is increasing in importance. What is needed is a way to improve insight into the costs of cloud services, traffic between cloud and on-prem and between cloud instances, network performance and latency, end-user experience and application performance. 9

10 Take control of the cloud To take control of the cloud, network operations and cloud architects need a new generation of network performance management (NPM) tools that meet the requirements of hybrid environments. These tools should unify monitoring across all environments and provide the same level of insight into the cloud as they do for on-premises. Riverbed delivers both the breadth and the depth needed to monitor network and application performance across on-prem, virtual, and cloud environments. By using packet-based and cloud-flow-based network monitoring, operations teams can get the complete network picture of the hybrid cloud⁴. Packets: allow IT to examine conversations within and between apps in the cloud to understand time and errors, and to look at traffic between the enterprise and the cloud. Flow: provides an understanding of hybrid network performance including traffic between the enterprise and cloud and monitors and measures the cost and implications of the traffic. 4. ESG, Rethinking Network Performance in Hybrid Clouds, October

11 Take control of the cloud (continued) By combining packet- and flow-based analysis, Riverbed s network performance monitoring solution helps you answer: What apps are running in the cloud? How is the network performing? Who s talking to whom? How is traffic flowing through the network? Where am I incurring costs? What is the cause of issues in my hybrid environment? What is the impact of these issues on the user experience? To learn more about network visibility in and for the cloud, go to riverbed.com/take-cloud-control 11

12 About the Survey This survey was conducted by Dimensional Research, an independent research firm specializing in corporate IT. Over 300 IT decision makers with direct responsibility for network and cloud environments completed the survey. All worked at companies with more than 1,000 employees. Participants came from around the globe and represented a wide range of industries, job levels, and cloud environments. Learn more about Dimensional Research; dimensionalresearch.com. About Riverbed Riverbed, The Digital Performance Company, enables organizations to maximize digital performance across every aspect of their business, allowing customers to rethink possible. Riverbed s unified and integrated Digital Performance Platform brings together a powerful combination of Digital Experience, Cloud Networking and Cloud Edge solutions that provides a modern IT architecture for the digital enterprise, delivering new levels of operational agility and dramatically accelerating business performance and outcomes. At more than $1 billion in annual revenue, Riverbed s 30,000+ customers include 98% of the Fortune 100 and 100% of the Forbes Global 100. Learn more at riverbed.com Riverbed Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logos used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology.