Cloud Bottlenecks: What's Worse, Lost Revenue or Poor User Experience?

Cloud bottlenecks can have numerous consequences but the most concerning one is their impact on user experience, according to a global survey of 468 IT decision makers published this week.

Nearly two-thirds, or 64 percent, of those surveyed said the impact on the end user experience was the top management concern, compared with 44 percent, who were worried about the effect poor performance can have on revenue. Fifty-one percent pointed to brand reputation as the biggest concern. The study was conducted by Research in Action and commissioned by application performance management vendor Compuware.

Certainly, it's no surprise that any vendor would publish a report saying that performance management and the hidden costs associated with it are concerns (in the latter case, it's a worry for 79 percent of respondents). Nor is it a revelation that anyone in IT is concerned about the impact of bottlenecks from any form of technology. So drilling deeper into the findings, it stood out to me that management is more concerned about the impact on user experience over the risk on revenues.

Does this mean management equates user experience to revenues, or simply that companies are not at the point where they're running apps in the cloud that could have consequences on revenues? I find it hard to believe the an IT decision maker these days would be more worried about a bottleneck's effect on user experience over revenues unless he or she sees the two intertwined. 

Among some other findings in the study:

• Eighty-one percent already use or plan to deploy cloud-based e-commerce platforms within the next year.
  
  
• Seventy-three percent use outdated methods to track and manage app performance.
  
  
• Cloud infrastructure and services will be the No. 1 investment by CIOs in 2013 (12. 5 percent) followed by renegotiating outsourcing contracts (9.6 percent) and big data analytics (9.2 percent).
  
  
• Test and backup is the leading area IT will invest in cloud computing over the next year (24.1 percent), followed by building private clouds (17.1 percent), and public and hybrid cloud deployments (15 percent).

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 07/18/2013 at 12:49 PM