Report: Businesses relying on outsourcing firms to monitor cloud applications, want better management

Friday, May 21, 2010

InformationWeek Analytics released its latest IT report recently and found that outsourcing continues to be important for businesses, but enterprises are seeking more from these third parties. As a result, of the 530 business professionals polled by the analysis company, 29 percent reported that they fired an outsourcing firm during the last 12 months.

Many respondents felt that better outsourcing management is needed with end-user support and the development of customer-facing applications. More than half of respondents felt third-party management in these two areas needed to improve. Despite this, the two growing business functions - cloud computing and SaaS - received favorable reviews, with the majority of respondents saying their managed network has delivered high quality. Forty-four percent also commented that they plan to expand use for these areas with their outsourcing partner.

Ironically, as companies do incorporate and rely on cloud computing more frequently, only 17 percent of respondents said that they monitor the performance of uptime of their cloud application, while 59 percent said they rely on their outsourcing firm to do so.

"By far the largest block of poll respondents, 35 percent, came from companies with 10,000 or more employees," said Lorna Garey, content director of InformationWeek Analytics. "More than half don't directly monitor the performance and uptime of their cloud applications. But relying solely on the vendor for SLA monitoring is like putting the fox in charge of the hen house."

A recent report from CloudTweaks found that 20 percent of all IT companies will begin using cloud computing within four years.