Cloud testing and monitoring markets set to boom

The market for tools and services that offer cloud infrastructure analysis and cloud application monitoring is set to nearly triple over the next five years. 

Recent analysis from Frost and Sullivan found each market is expected to grow through 2017 with each market projected to grow to  $320.2 (£198) and $556.2 (£344) million respectively. It found that the markets in 2010 were $68.0 (£42.0) million and $168.0 (£103) million, respectively.

The report found that the two most important factors for deploying cloud services are availability and security. The report's author noted that security within the cloud market is also emerging and has many related aspects such as data protection, application security, privacy and standard compliance.

"Besides testing the cloud infrastructure for security, scalability and performance, enterprises also seek insights into the performance of applications hosted in the cloud environment," said Frost and  Sullivan senior research analyst Srihari Padmanabhan. "Service providers, enterprise organisations and network engineers need to understand the root cause of faults in the network by gaining end-to-end visibility across the cloud, giving numerous opportunities for application monitoring as well."

Padmanabhan added that in order to meet the demand of service level agreements placed upon them by customers, providers would find it necessary to continually monitor their cloud environments for problems.

"Every service provider is expected to meet the quality of service as defined by the SLA," said Padmanabhan. "To do this, service providers need to constantly monitor their cloud infrastructure and allocate resources so that applications can respond properly to peaks in a load."

The researcher noted that cloud-based application monitoring has witnessed the emergence of open-source solutions that can monitor the performance of cloud applications. Even though these solutions do not provide insights into the actual performance of the application, they have been widely accepted as an alternative to application performance monitoring solutions, he said.

With the increase in demand for monitoring solutions, several other commercially backed open-source solutions will emerge in the market, posing a threat to companies who measure application performance, according to the report.

"To reach success in such a market scenario, participants have to perform a careful analysis of the expected ROI and leverage their market intelligence information to determine growth opportunities," said Padmanabhan.