IT bosses are keen on embracing cloud computing but are worried about management and control, according to research released by application traffic management (ATM) firm Zeus Technology.
The survey spoke to CIOs, IT directors and other senior IT managers about their attitude to cloud computing. Although 55% said the are already using or plan to start using cloud computing in the near future, only 14% said they had systems in place to manage the hosted environment.
Other barriers to adoption that the survey picked up on included worries about a lack of const control (48%), scalability (27%) and, most importantly, worries about being locked into one vendor (65%).
The results were released to coincide with the launch of Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0 and the announcement of Zeus Cloud Traffic Manager, due for release in Q1 2010. Paul Brennan, CEO of Zeus, told CBR that Traffic Manager 6.0 could help boost cloud-based web performance by ensuring that they are always running at peak performance.
An online retailer, for example, can prioritise bandwidth for someone who is in the process of buying something instead of someone who is just browsing the site.
“If you have a very loaded website and a gold card and silver card clients are surfing, you want to give the gold card client preferential service without throwing the silver client off,” he said. “During peak load times you want to make sure that someone about to buy is given preferential service. That doesn’t mean the other person browsing gets thrown off but the site will get a little slower.”
Version 6.0 also features diagnostic and analysis tools that can enable a company to scale up bandwidth when it’s needed and reduce it when not. The analysis tools can also be used to locate, diagnose and fix issues within the infrastructure.
Brennan also confirmed to CBR that Zeus will be releasing Zeus Enterprise Traffic Management early in 2010. Cloud Traffic Manager is part of this platform, which Zeus says will be able to manage traffic across three different environments: physical, virtual and cloud.
“When we looked at the marketplace, we discovered that there is a need for a physical solution, a virtual solution and a cloud solution,” Brennan said. “We don’t believe that physical and virtual will cease to be but there will be a hybrid solution. We believe we need to extend the role of the traffic manager to all three environments.”
Brennan said that this platform should enable companies to deploy and manage web services with interoperability between all three environments. The cloud, Brennan argues, should not be treated any differently to any other part of the business.
“The cloud is something that companies are going to have to address due to the increasing pressure to deliver web services,” he said. “People want to have the ‘Google moment’, where you click the button and it’s there. If people don’t get an instant response from your website, they’ll go somewhere else. People need to be online all the time and that means managing across all three platforms. We believe this is the next logical evolution for traffic management.”
