For years, the benefits of moving to the cloud – including lowered costs, flexibility and faster time-to-market – have been espoused. But among IT professionals, there remains widespread reticence about migrating mission-critical applications over, due in large part to performance concerns. “Can the cloud really deliver the same level of speed and reliability as physical services?” IT asks. Business managers often minimize or downplay these worries, saying that the potential business benefits to be reaped are just too mission-critical to ignore.
Therein lies a major conflict. Regardless, as numerous surveys like this one from IDC demonstrate, cloud adoption is moving forward at a rapid pace. Clearly, the cloud is where we’re headed. IT must learn to accept the cloud as just part of how services are delivered today, rather than some exotic and potentially dangerous new technology. The good news is IT’s concerns about application performance are not insurmountable and can actually be eased with specific approaches.