Proactive Web Performance Monitoring critical to enterprise cloud performance

According to Web Performance Monitoring specialists Aurora 365, organisations are still applying too much of their enterprise performance monitoring focus on their on-premise systems – often overlooking the fact that public cloud applications are now growing almost five times faster than their on-premise computing workloads*.

With research from Gartner suggesting that cloud office systems use will make up 33% of enterprise computing by 2017, it’s clear that businesses need to place a much greater emphasis on tracking cloud deployment performance. Most organisations already entrust multiple critical applications to the cloud – whether it’s Salesforce.com, Microsoft applications such as Office365 or applications running on Amazon Web Services. It’s estimated that many now have up to 10 different public clouds in operation, often initially commissioned at a departmental or branch level, and presenting the central IT function with an increasingly complex management issue.

“Organisations turn to cloud because of its acknowledged deployment speed and instant scalability, but they often find that the freedom to focus on business strategies and benefits without having to worry about IT infrastructure management issues proves equally compelling,” commented Dominic List, Aurora365’s Chairman. “However, despite effectively outsourcing infrastructure management to cloud providers, organisations still need to track the real-time operational performance of their cloud-based applications, and that’s particularly the case when it’s essential applications such as Microsoft SharePoint, SalesForce.com or Office365 that have been deployed. That’s why having a cloud-based infrastructure monitoring solution such as Aurora365 in place makes particular sense for organisations as they continue to invest in an increasingly complex combinations of cloud services.”

“Web Performance Monitoring is all about proactive problem prevention, and with Aurora365 we can perform the kind of in-depth responsiveness and error checking that our customers require for their critical websites, be they customer-owned or from a major 3rd party supplier,” added Dominic. “Adopting an active approach to monitoring and resolving cloud IT issues – instead of waiting for customers to flag up problems via your service desk – can significantly reduce the operational strain on the IT organisation.”

Key examples of Aurora365 Web Performance Monitoring in action include:

· Deploying Aurora365 to perform direct checks on Microsoft SharePoint platforms that were running slowly for offsite users – effective Web Performance Monitoring is able to resolve the usability balance between internal and external users

· Global Salesforce.com Web Performance check – providing a rounded view of how a global organisation’s Salesforce.com deployment is performing across multiple directly deployed implementations, as well as Amazon EC2 instances for remote workers in other international locations

· Delivering in-depth website performance and error checking analysis for high street retailers - particularly during highly volatile seasonal periods where business activity can fluctuate dramatically and require different orders of performance

· Providing on-demand Web Performance Monitoring – offering a cloud solution such as Aurora365 makes the solution available for organisations that require additional performance monitoring during a problem period to help drive analysis, such as windows fault isolation

Dominic List concludes: “Monitoring from the cloud forms a neutral location for assessing performance. When customers monitor through their own infrastructure they are actually adding bias to the results when performance issues occur. The alternative is to assess performance from the customer’s site – or series of sites – plus from our own neutral location. The net benefit of being able to show the cloud provider a set of results from our customers’ end-user locations, plus a neutral cloud location is that they can get the cloud provider to rapidly recognise their issues, either remediating and/or issuing service credits.”