Enterprises and IT organizations are leveraging the cloud features to the fullest, despite the new level of complexity added to cloud applications’ management. It was one of the significant findings of the Enterprise Management Associates report.

According to Julie Craig, the report’s author and research director at EMA, the application management process is getting extremely complicated once we integrate Cloud Desktop with it. Organizations are using clouds in a sophisticated manner, which can be surprising. For instance, half of the surveyed companies are running their operations on both on-premise and cloud desktops as well. On the other hand, 35% of them have integrated or are in the middle of integrating multi SaaS applications.

She added that most surveyed companies have been running their transactions over many SaaS services, sophisticatedly deployed, but are struggling to find the right AMP products to deal with such complexities. The research findings proved that many public cloud infrastructures didn’t offer to monitor agents or APIs, stopping vendors from building management capabilities into APM products.

Despite everything, most medium to large-sized enterprises have accepted the public cloud as a feasible option for business-critical apps. The report even showed that almost 66% of the organizations are already using IaaS or planning to adopt it next year. It also showed that 44% of them are using one or more SaaS services, while 33% are still planning to do so next year.

When you think about managing cloud applications, there are some key challenges, according to Craig, one of the said challenges is to design an end-to-end picture of the application. Without the picture, you wouldn’t know where to start to solve application problems related to performance. The real challenge is to analyze almost 30 to 40 application components to figure out the problem. Craig added that to figure out the problem, you’d have to look through the technology from beginning to end, which can take a tremendous amount of time. Not only that, but it could be an expensive task to manage complex environments with just the staff.

Despite every AMP product challenge, the vendors were quick to evolve products. The constant updates to cloud AMP solutions proved how quickly the market was evolving. The AMP report included OpTier, App Dynamics, App First, Aternity, CA, Compuware, eG Innovations, INETCO, Correlsense, IBM, Netuitive, HP, New Relic, OPNET, Splunk, Solar Winds, and Quest. Forty or more users of the previously mentioned products were surveyed.

Despite the enhancements, the level of APM complexity wasn’t going away any time soon, said Craig. The task of managing the complex environments is the trickiest task so far, as the application management depends on the metrics across the entire application, she added.

She envisioned the AMP products to be majorly automated, whereas full automation will likely take 5 to 10 years down the path, and flow-based networks will likely help achieve full automation of AMP systems. With network analytics, it will be easier to track and model application execution, enabling complete automation. Craig believes that network analytics will provide the information required to automate performance management. According to her, AMP product vendors will find ways to build an automated end-to-end view of application execution.