Today, companies can make the move into cloud services easily, thanks to major cloud players that allow businesses to get set up quickly. But they’re also discovering the next challenge: how to manage these cloud environments tools to ensure positive customer experiences.
New methods
“More than half of Fortune 500 companies in 2000 are no longer on the list,” says Karthik Rau, CEO of cloud monitoring company SignalFx. “That’s going to be even more pronounced over the next decade. What a lot of companies haven’t figured out is how do you release software every day without suffering downtime?” Rau points to Amazon, which pushes updates seamlessly every 17 minutes, on average.
Cloud monitoring
The answer, according to SignalFx’s CMO, Tom Butta, is bulletproof cloud monitoring. “We live in a world where the customer is in charge,” says Butta. “Their experience is what matters. Gaining full visibility into all of a company’s infrastructure and applications and services in ‘real real-time’ is key.”
Cloud monitoring is a set of tools that constantly evaluate cloud-based services and applications. It isn’t a new concept, but old-school batched or bundled reporting risks downtime, which can be devastating to a business. No matter the company size, a move into cloud services is eventually going to require a powerful, scalable cloud monitoring solution.
Butta sees it as a fundamental aspect of customer care today. “My grandparents ran a bakery, and they knew everything about their customers. That’s easy to do with a few hundred customers, versus a brand like Nike that might have half a billion records.”
The move to the cloud isn’t the endgame — it’s just the beginning. The key to surviving the cloud revolution is developing the ability to monitor and manage the cloud in real real-time.
