More than two-thirds (70%) of respondents indicated that they are unaware of how to measure performance of applications in the Cloud, despite 86% stating that performance visibility in the Cloud is vital, according to a new survey of 140 IT managers and professionals conducted by ExtraHop Networks at IPEXPO in October 2012.

“Measuring the performance of applications in the Cloud is the most important aspect of Cloud adoption,” said Owen Cole, VP EMEA at ExtraHop Networks. “Many assume the Cloud vendor takes care of performance measurement, however vendors usually only monitor resource utilization such as CPU and memory and not the applications and their flows, nor the transactions. More importantly, these vendors do not provide correlated, cross-tier visibility for the entire application delivery chain. Without these unified measurements, you cannot see how your applications are performing or analyze the end-user experience.”

The research also indicated that lack of visibility hinders cloud adoption. Results found the following top three reasons that organizations do not adopt cloud solutions:

- Performance auditing and accountability (30%)

- Achieving unified performance management across the datacenter (20%)

- Keeping track of assets (12%)

“Organizations need to move towards more-intelligent IT operations where IT teams can easily see problems and fix them whether in the cloud or in traditional environments. Otherwise, these issues can affect customers, with the potential for lost revenue and damage to the reputation of the company brand,” Cole concluded.