As the digital transformation wave sweeps through enterprises, users now expect 24/7 access to applications on whatever device they want to use. As a result, a growing number of organisations are migrating applications and information stores to public and private cloud solutions, so that hybrid IT architectures—where information is stored in the cloud as well as on local systems – have become the norm.
 
These complex networks have made monitoring the performance of all the applications and systems that run across them more and more difficult, costly and time-consuming for IT, and enterprises worldwide are realising how much more difficult ensuring consistent application performance levels is becoming within a hybrid environment. As shown in Riverbed’s Global Application Performance Survey, for businesses that take a fragmented approach to performance management, this can mean a negative impact on productivity and ultimately, on the bottom line.  Today’s companies need a fully integrated, proactive, agile approach to managing application performance that is directly tied to business value.
 
The agility challenge
According to EMA’s recent Network Management Megatrends 2016 study, 90 per cent of enterprises have put in place precise hybrid cloud deployment plans and are moving ahead with their implementation. Seventy per cent have either already completed a production hybrid cloud deployment or are in the process of doing so. The remaining 20 per cent plan to do so within the next two years. For most of these organisations, the deployment process will be ongoing, as applications and businesses’ needs evolve. In order to increase agility, IT is always evaluating and adopting cloud services and related technologies to deliver applications faster.
 
But achieving that agility has become a common stumbling block. Applications can fail or underperform for a multitude of reasons; such as the application code can be problematic, network issues can create connectivity issues, or the servers can fail. In response, most users blame these problems on IT and many (71 per cent) say they frequently feel “in the dark” about why their enterprise applications are running slowly.