According to a survey of 300 IT directors across Europe by Compuware, 57% of businesses are slowing or shutting down cloud applications, such as e-commerce sites, due to performance management issues.
Richard Stone, cloud computing solutions manager at Compuware, said security will always be an issue but now there is growing concern that third-party providers are causing businesses to lose control of cloud application performance.
Stone claimed IT departments are "in the dark" when faced with managing cloud applications within an organisation. "Existing tools and legacy systems inside the enterprise to monitor applications don't work for cloud apps. The tools enterprises are using are not giving end-to-end visibility", he said.
"IT managers have got to start leading inside organisations by embracing [cloud computing] and not leave end-users to do their own thing. Put the right tools in place to make sure users get what they want but provide performance management", he added.
The research also showed 84% of IT directors expect service level agreements to go beyond simple availability metrics if these are used for business-critical cloud apps.
The study surveyed 300 European IT directors in enterprise organisations with more than 1000 employees.
This story was first published by Computer Weekly