Securely Move Mission-Critical Apps to Hyperscale Providers with Visibility and Performance Management

In recent years, many companies have begun moving critical applications to hyperscale cloud providers as a way to save money, improve reliability, and take advantage of the security services offered by the large cloud providers. The cloud frees users from operating their own infrastructure, allows them to pay for only the resources they use, and gives them a huge team of cloud experts to support their applications.

Even with these advantages, moving mission critical applications to hyperscale cloud services can be an anxiety-inducing process, as organizations often don’t have full visibility to monitor these apps, the network, and their performance.

In many cases, this means companies worry about missing app dependencies in the process. They don’t have hard data on how these applications will perform in the cloud – and whether the network at the cloud provider and the network between the client and the cloud provider are up to the task.

While cloud providers offer their own monitoring tools, organizations moving important applications to the cloud should consider doing their own monitoring. One modern term for this type of monitoring is “visibility and performance management,” or VPM, while some also call it “observability.”

A new way to look at monitoring

Companies have always had to monitor systems to see if they’re working or failing. But as complexity has increased, there’s a greater need for observability. And while moving applications to the cloud has many benefits, it does add complexity to computing systems.

When a company has a complex system and something fails, it can be difficult to track down the cause. It was relatively easy to do this when systems were monolithic. In addition, moving to the cloud adds a new, outside computing system to the mix as well as new networks, which can, at times, run more slowly than expected. As systems become more complex, they need more efficient ways to observe what’s going on.

A VPM tool can provide visibility into the apps, allow users to proactively manage their performance, automatically identify potential problems, and resolve network and application challenges quickly and securely.

Reducing mean time to repair

VPM addresses the so-called mean time to innocence, the time it takes to prove that the network, the application, or the cloud provider is not to blame for an application performance problem. It allows companies to identify the particular domain that’s causing the problem.

As a result, VPM can reduce the mean time to repair. Companies can find what’s causing the problem, fix it as soon as possible, and make sure it doesn’t happen again. This is particularly important when an organization wants to securely move a mission-critical application to a hyperscale cloud provider.

VPM helps companies understand and benchmark the normal performance of an app before moving it. It will not only monitor an app at a specific time, but also help companies understand the normal performance over time, so it gives users data-driven performance monitoring.

For example, users sometimes complain that an app’s performance has suffered after it has been moved to the cloud. VPM can show users if that’s actually the case, or if the performance lag is just a perception. It can also tell companies if the move to the cloud actually improved performance as expected, providing users with both before-and-after data.

Understanding dependencies

Most modern VPM tools can also visualize the topography of an app and its dependencies. It allows users to see how apps and systems are connected and see paths through the network. If a company is moving a complex application, it can see the topography and its dependencies, so that it doesn’t miss a dependency in the move. As noted above, missing a dependency is one of the biggest fears that IT teams have when moving these complex applications to the cloud.

This all leads to a more secure and reliable move of complex and mission-critical apps to a hyperscale cloud provider.

VPM and related tools allow companies to move apps to the cloud and ensure that they perform at least as well as they did on premises. If there are problems, users have the visibility they need to reduce mean time to innocence and mean time to resolution.

Learn more about how VPM reduces risk when companies need to move their mission-critical applications.