- Organizations are becoming increasingly distributed, spanning remote offices, strategic partners, outsourced workforces, and ad hoc teams in order to take advantage of the most talent for the lowest expense
- Organizations are cutting headcount and trimming operational budgets, making employee productivity more important than ever before
- Networked applications are involved in nearly every aspect of business operations, including product design, production, sales, marketing, accounting, logistics, and customer service
It would seem prudent, then, for organizations to monitor the performance of their applications, since networked applications are 1) the tools most workers are using, and 2) at risk of reducing worker productivity through performance problems and application outages.
But many organizations don't systematically monitor application performance at all. This jarring revelation appears in a study about cloud computing just published by InformationWeek.
The study noted that 40% of respondents didn't have a system in place to monitor internal applications, let alone cloud applications. An integrator interviewed in the study remarked that fewer than 30% of his customers had application monitoring systems in place; in other words, more than 70% didn't monitor applications.
Given the rising popularity of video and voice applications, which require high-performance, low-latency network connections, and the rising popularity of cloud computing—in use or about to be in use at 27% of the organizations surveyed—the lack of application monitoring seems like trouble in the offing.
The InformationWeek article offers a number of helpful suggestions, including the use of WAN optimization for accelerating applications serving remote offices. Application performance monitoring solutions from companies such as Blue Coat, Fluke Networks, NetScout, and WildPackets can also be helpful. A new standard called Apdex, which attempts to measure the quality of service an application delivers, is gaining a following and also worth a look.
Disclosure: Blue Coat is a client.
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