Advisory Note:
Managing Applications in the Public and Private Cloud

Date: 08/25/2011

Length: 7 pages

Cost: $0.00

Abstract:
Cloud Computing has ushered in a new era of enterprise IT in which IT has become a service broker and systems integrator as well as a service provider. This relatively recent (and rapid) shift introduces a variety of management and governance issues, many of which are related to monitoring and managing business applications. Today’s companies are struggling to answer a variety of important questions related to performance and availability management. The intent of this paper is to uncover the nature of these challenges and open up discussion regarding the capabilities necessary to address them.

The paper is a subset of a longer paper published in full in August, 2011, entitled End-to-End Application Management in the Age of Cloud Computing. The original paper was in two sections. The first outlined requirements for managing the different Cloud "flavors," and updated the ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA) Application Management Semantic Model to reflect the addition of Cloud Analytics. The second section included analysis and graphics from a 2011 EMA survey on applications in the Cloud.
This paper is a shorter version which includes only the first section of the original paper. The intent in publishing this version is to provide a free summary of EMA's latest thinking about managing business applications that execute in the Cloud, in whole or in part.

EMA published related research throughout 2008 and updated it in 2010. The series was originally undertaken on the premise that the term "end-to-end" means different things to different constituencies. It sought to bring rigor to the end-to-end concept by detailing the elements required to monitor the application ecosystem in context to its technology fabric. The EMA End-to-End Application Management Semantic Model updated in this paper was originally introduced in 2008, and has evolved since that time as the industry itself has changed. This paper updates the Model by adding a Cloud component.

This research track uncovered trends related to industry maturity and summarized the people, process, and technology factors impacting application support. This report starts with the premise that, regardless of where an application is hosted, IT is ultimately responsible for its delivery. While a service can be outsourced, responsibility for its successful delivery still lies with the CIO. This report should help IT organizations assess how ready they are to assume these responsibilities as applications increasingly span on-premise and Cloud platforms.