By Anne Widjaja
Fifty-five per cent of businesses experience application performance problems at least every month, a recent Telsyte survey, commissioned by platform service company Infoplex, has found.
The report, titled Business application performance among mid-sized organisations, surveyed 150 CIOs and IT decision makers on their experiences with business application performance.
According to the report, 43 per cent of respondents cited business application performance as a “frequent” problem, while 12 per cent complained that performance was an issue that affected business “too frequently”.
The survey also highlighted which applications were giving businesses the most trouble. Nearly a third of respondents identified the database layer (SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL and so on) as most prone to causing issues, followed by COTS applications and the network (switches, routers and so on). Since each of these areas was similarly rated, the report determined that it was difficult to isolate one part of the system as the main cause of poor applicaton performance.
“These results indicate any type of business application can experience performance problems, with the less-structured applications tending to be the worst performers,” the report said.
The report found that despite 66 per cent of businesses having existing processes in place to deal with performance problems, one-third of businesses prefer to rely on outsourced service providers for help. Forty-seven per cent of respondents rely on vendor support to fix business apps with slow performance.
The report also showed the increasing adoption of cloud practices in business IT. Nearly half of respondents indicated that they were already using cloud services, with 21 per cent looking to move on-premise workloads to the cloud.
An overwhelming number of respondents also indicated that they would consider not only moving their applications to the cloud, but also taking measures to ensure these applications would continue to perform well.
Seventy-seven per cent of respondents indicated that they would consider adopting Service Level Agreement (SLA)-backed application performance cloud services.
Organisations were also willing to increase their average spend by 28 per cent, in order to adopt performance-guaranteed hosting.
Telsyte warned that rather than relying on outsourced help, businesses should take more responsibility for dealing with business application performance internally.
“Amid the industry excitement around cloud computing and hosting business applications with their parties, organisations must ensure the problems of on-premise application performance are not simply shifted to outside the company’s walls,” the report said.
The findings showed that moving in house applications to cloud providers without addressing the root cause of performance problems, “would not result in an improved experience for employees or an increase in the organisation’s productivity”.
