IT admins' worries about troubleshooting apps problems

More than a third of enterprise IT managers are wary about moving applications to a private cloud as they believe it would make it harder to pinpoint the causes of problems.

That’s according to a survey conducted by software company Precise which found that large numbers of enterprises are still concerned about problems with cloud environments. According to the survey, just 37 percent of companies are willing to migrate the majority of their applications to private cloud. There’s even less support for public cloud: only six percent of survey respondents are opting to go down this route.

According to the survey, the most popular applications were email and collaboration systems, chosen by 39 percent of respondents, followed by IT management. Sales, marketing, finance, HR and security also featured.

Despite the concerns about trouble-shooting problems, the desire to improve application performance was the most often-cited benefit of moving to the cloud with 26 percent of respondents stating that it was their reason for migrating.

According to Zohar Gilad, Executive VP with Precise, virtualisation can often lead to confusion. ”When a problem occurs, virtualisation is the enemy of visibility. Compounded with dynamic provisioning in the cloud and server cluster architecture, it's difficult to determine which server, VM, or application instance is to blame when troubleshooting,” he said.

Gilad warned that IT managers should carefully monitor application performance before and after cloud migration. “Automation of transaction monitoring from the user down to storage, between physical and virtual layers, is critical. Companies should deploy processes and tools that can handle the dynamic nature of the cloud, and allow quick access to historical performance data during troubleshooting."