While the application is now the heart of businesses of all sizes and its performance is the lifeblood of success, IT continues to struggle to ensure its performance and availability, according to a new survey by SolarWinds.
The proliferation of BYOD, cloud, SaaS and consumer technologies in the workplace have made the application the disruptive technology that will drive business IT into the coming decades. At the same time, the application delivery chain is becoming more complex to support as applications become more networked, virtualization drives IT infrastructure convergence and abstraction and end users become more mobile.
Applications affect nearly every aspect of our world. And not just business, but well beyond. Today, applications impact people’s lives in ways never imagined just five to ten years ago. The resulting importance of application performance and availability requires IT to expand beyond infrastructure-centric management to add app-centric management. Beginning now and increasingly so in the future, this will make or break businesses. Ultimately, IT will be held responsible for application performance, regardless of whether the application resides on premise or in the cloud. It’s no longer just about if an application working, it’s about that application working to end user expectations. These survey results should be a wakeup call for IT pros everywhere.
Fielded in June 2014, the survey yielded responses from 403 business application end users currently employed full time in an office environment—public and private sector small, mid-size and enterprise companies — in the US.
Survey Findings:
The Application is the Heart of Business and its Performance is the Lifeblood of Success
Applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, NetSuite and others, are now at the core of nearly all business-critical functions and beyond. Major vendors such as Cisco have acknowledged this reality by architecting data center offerings to be app-centric. With this, application performance and availability have become more important than ever; productivity, end user satisfaction and revenue are all affected.
In fact, 93 percent of business end users who responded to the survey said application performance and availability affect their ability to do their job, with 62 percent saying it is absolutely critical. Furthermore, 67 percent said it has become more important over the past five years. In addition, approximately one in five said slow or unavailable applications result in significant financial loss (tens of thousands of dollars or more) for their companies annually.
Reliance on Applications is High - End User Expectations are Even Higher
The quality of the end user application experience is critical for success. End users expect applications to work and work well. When application performance or availability issues do arise, end users expect a quick response time to problem resolution from IT, down to just minutes in some cases. For example, 67 percent of respondents said they expect application performance or availability problems to be resolved within an hour of reporting them, with 35 percent expecting a resolution in a half hour or less.
IT Struggles to Ensure Application Performance and Availability
Despite the rise of applications as king of business infrastructure, applications and some form of management tools to support them have been in general business use for decades. However, the struggle for IT to ensure performance and availability of business-critical applications remains. To illustrate, 81 percent of respondents contacted their IT department in the past year due to an application performance or availability issue, with one-third having done so six times or more.
The complexity of the modern application stack (AppStack), or the application delivery chain comprised of the application and all the backend IT that supports it—software, middleware and extended infrastructure required for performance — adds to the challenge of identifying issues and the time required to resolve them.
For instance, 36 percent said they have waited a full business day or more for performance or availability problems with business-critical applications to be resolved, with 22 percent having waited several business days or more.
Suaad Sait is EVP Products and Markets at SolarWinds.
The Latest
In the heat of the holiday online shopping rush, retailers face persistent challenges such as increased web traffic or cyber threats that can lead to high-impact outages. With profit margins under high pressure, retailers are prioritizing strategic investments to help drive business value while improving the customer experience ...
In a fast-paced industry where customer service is a priority, the opportunity to use AI to personalize products and services, revolutionize delivery channels, and effectively manage peaks in demand such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday are vast. By leveraging AI to streamline demand forecasting, optimize inventory, personalize customer interactions, and adjust pricing, retailers can have a better handle on these stress points, and deliver a seamless digital experience ...
Broad proliferation of cloud infrastructure combined with continued support for remote workers is driving increased complexity and visibility challenges for network operations teams, according to new research conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Broadcom ...
New research from ServiceNow and ThoughtLab reveals that less than 30% of banks feel their transformation efforts are meeting evolving customer digital needs. Additionally, 52% say they must revamp their strategy to counter competition from outside the sector. Adapting to these challenges isn't just about staying competitive — it's about staying in business ...
Leaders in the financial services sector are bullish on AI, with 95% of business and IT decision makers saying that AI is a top C-Suite priority, and 96% of respondents believing it provides their business a competitive advantage, according to Riverbed's Global AI and Digital Experience Survey ...
SLOs have long been a staple for DevOps teams to monitor the health of their applications and infrastructure ... Now, as digital trends have shifted, more and more teams are looking to adapt this model for the mobile environment. This, however, is not without its challenges ...
Modernizing IT infrastructure has become essential for organizations striving to remain competitive. This modernization extends beyond merely upgrading hardware or software; it involves strategically leveraging new technologies like AI and cloud computing to enhance operational efficiency, increase data accessibility, and improve the end-user experience ...
AI sure grew fast in popularity, but are AI apps any good? ... If companies are going to keep integrating AI applications into their tech stack at the rate they are, then they need to be aware of AI's limitations. More importantly, they need to evolve their testing regiment ...
If you were lucky, you found out about the massive CrowdStrike/Microsoft outage last July by reading about it over coffee. Those less fortunate were awoken hours earlier by frantic calls from work ... Whether you were directly affected or not, there's an important lesson: all organizations should be conducting in-depth reviews of testing and change management ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 11, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) ...