According to a survey conducted by Zenoss during VMworld 2011, nearly 75 percent of respondents are currently building or operating private cloud infrastructures, with an additional 16% planning projects in the next 12 months. However, while 72 percent of respondents are worried about guaranteeing business service delivery using cloud infrastructures, only 44 percent of the respondents have IT operations management software in place that can monitor physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures.

The survey polled 114 VMworld attendees.

Enterprises and service providers alike are flocking to the cloud, which can offer tremendous benefits to their businesses. Leading analyst firm Gartner estimates the cloud market will reach a staggering $148.8 billion by 2014. However, well-publicized outages temper the enthusiasm for the cloud by many IT managers, and highlight the challenges to delivering service in a cloud infrastructure. As the survey revealed, while the vast majority of respondents have cloud plans and are concerned about service delivery, they have not yet formulated their management strategy.

“Organizations of all sizes and from all industries are moving to the cloud without a clear strategy for managing the performance of their cloud computing resources,” says Bill Karpovich, CEO of Zenoss. “Whether businesses are using public, private, or hybrid cloud infrastructures, having a comprehensive IT operations and service assurance solution is critical to ensuring optimal service delivery.”

Zenoss recently launched Zenoss Service Dynamics, the market's first service impact management solution that both unifies and automates impact and root cause analysis for IT services that span private and public IT infrastructures. Service providers and enterprises use Zenoss Service Dynamics to maintain visibility into the health of their hybrid IT services from a single console that is easy-to-configure and automatically updated in real-time as workloads migrate and relationships change. Unlike legacy solutions, Zenoss' offering natively understands virtualization and cloud services, and automatically adapts to changes in the underlying infrastructure that impact service delivery.