Cloud Computing has ushered in a new era of enterprise IT in which IT has become a service broker and systems integrator as well as a service provider. This relatively recent (and rapid) shift introduces a variety of management and governance issues, many of which are related to monitoring and managing business applications.

Today's companies are struggling to answer a variety of important questions related to performance and availability management. The intent of this paper is to uncover the nature of these challenges and open up discussion regarding the capabilities necessary to address them. 

The 2011 paper is in two parts. The first section outlines requirements for managing the different Cloud "flavors," and updates Enterprise Management Associate's (EMA's) Application Management Semantic Model to reflect the addition of Cloud Analytics. The second section reports the results of EMA's latest end-to-end application management survey on Cloud usage and the ways in which today's IT organizations are managing Cloud services.

This research builds on similar research published in 2008 and 2010 by adding a Cloud component. The series was initially undertaken on the premise that the term "end-to-end" means different things to different constituencies. It sought to bring rigor to the end-to-end concept by detailing the elements required to monitor the application ecosystem in context to its technology fabric.

This research track uncovered trends related to industry maturity and summarized the people, process, and technology factors impacting application support. It also assessed adoption rates of the various tool families and customer satisfaction with those tools. Follow-up research finalized in early 2010 updated the data and assessed the impact of a brutal economy on people, process, and tools selections. 

This report is the third iteration of the survey and adds assessments related to the impact of Cloud Computing on the end-to-end management of business applications. It starts with the premise that, regardless of where an application is hosted, IT is ultimately responsible for its delivery. While a service can be outsourced, responsibility for its successful delivery still lies with the CIO. This report should help IT organizations assess how ready they are to assume these responsibilities as applications increasingly span on-premise and Cloud platforms.