Visibility - Key for Moving Financial Services to the Cloud

There are benefits to migrating to the cloud, yet there are serious concerns as well. Australia's financial services regulator, APRA, has issued warnings regarding security (such as off-shore service concerns), dependability, and privacy. Australia isn't the only country concerned with these issues. Keeping cloud-based services safe and secure is a global concern. Just as important is ensuring the availability and performance of business services once they migrate to the cloud. As the level of distribution increases in a hybrid cloud world, it becomes far more difficult to ensure service levels. How do financial institutions address these concerns so they can benefit from the cloud?

The answer lies in choosing the right application performance management solution to provide the visibility financial service providers require for each area of concern. Application performance monitoring deals with five aspects of the financial business. It monitors end-user experience, maps transactions, monitors applications, monitors databases and monitors infrastructure. Each one of these areas can be compromised for security, dependability, and privacy.

Application performance monitoring must include the ability to provide visibility into the virtual world in order to fit the Forrester APM Model. This means APM's ability to provide infrastructure monitoring must expand to applications on the cloud. Only when an APM solution covers every aspect of infrastructure and operations (I&O) can it provide the solution to availability and dependability and truly provide outage avoidance.

Application Performance Management - Visibility to Prevent End User Impact

End users do not care about the cloud. It is only important to the service provider as a way to reduce cost. The end user cares about performance, availability and accountability.  Failure to remember this can result in order fall out and customer attrition.  Regaining customer trust is expensive.

How does application performance management (APM) predict problems and provide outage avoidance? The business transaction management (BTM) component of APM enables I&O managers to see every transaction in real-time. Transactions that behave abnormally can be identified and automatically analyzed to determine the root cause of their behavior. Situational analysis can be used to prevent these issues from having business impact.   Problem prediction is provided via automatic behavioral analysis of trends in service delivery. Automatic alerts keep IT staff in the know when abnormal transaction behaviors occur.

Application Performance Management - Visibility for Dependable Cloud Services

Gaining portability is only as beneficial as the ability to retain visibility into each transaction. When applications and data traverse from one trading partner to another, a financial institution needs to maintain control of transactional data at all times. Without this control, cascading failures remain a customer impacting concern.
The cloud is just as complex as any IT infrastructure. No efforts to abstract this complexity are going to change that fact. Just as application performance management is essential for providing visibility into in-house I&O, it is also essential for any financial business moving activities to the cloud.

Application performance management is designed to provide this type of visibility. Whether financial transactions take place in middleware messaging platforms at home or on the cloud, real-time reporting on where each transaction originated, where it ended and where it went along that path is essential to providing dependable IT services. Identifying latency issues and bottlenecks automatically reduces the risk of customer impacting problems, and it greatly reduces the number of mission critical events a financial institution faces.

Application Performance Management - Driven by Complex Event Processing

In the background, complex event processing is the driving force behind effective application performance management. The complex event processing (CEP) engine enables everything. From monitoring the end user experience to tracking transactions from end-to-end; enabling predictive analysis of transaction behaviors and automation of outage avoidance, an application performance management solution is only as strong as the complex event processor it uses.

Cloud services offer financial businesses greater flexibility and scalability options. They can be implemented safely and securely, without any interruption in service as long as the right application performance monitoring solution is put into place. Before making a final decision look into what Nastel's AutoPilot APM solution for the Cloud has to offer.

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About the author

Denise Rutledge enjoys researching and writing about technology products. She writes on many financial and business topics, including software solutions that impact business performance in the financial industry. Denise also works with clients to develop website content, with a focus on writing materials that develop brand and trust through valuable, easy to read information. Learn more by visiting her website at http://www.writingasaghost.com.

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