How to Evaluate IT Performance the Right Way
Socrates is known for saying that the unexamined life is not worth living. Today he’d likely say that the unexamined IT network is not worth maintaining.
For companies considering a move to the cloud, it’s important to evaluate your company’s IT infrastructure to ensure your cloud provider’s services will meet your needs and help your organization achieve its goals. For those who are already using a cloud provider, it’s important to evaluate the consistency of the service and that they’re delivering quality performance on a continual basis.
The Three Central Areas of a Cloud Evaluation
Constant uptime, quick access, and robust capacity are what you should expect from an IT system, and when these factors aren’t being delivered, it affects productivity as well as profitability.
Making sure that the following three key areas are optimized will provide a solid foundation for a company’s infrastructure. Each of them is central to an IT infrastructure’s performance, no matter the business objectives, and examining them will provide a complete picture of a system’s performance.
- vCPU performance: A virtual central processing unit is essential to the strong performance of all a system’s applications. The vCPU provides the capability to deliver dependable functionality on which employees depend. It’s also scalable and can contribute to handling multiple operations depending on user demand.
- Storage/disk performance: The value of data has increased for businesses in every industry, and so has its production, with the amount of data rising higher every year. I/O results are how most people evaluate cloud performance as it is one of the most noticeable when there is not adequate performance. Data has always been an important facet in business operations, and now that it’s an even more critical asset, it’s crucial that a network that can handle its expanding data capacity.
- Internal network performance: The speed at which servers within the cloud can interact with each other and execute workloads. If you have a bottleneck in this area it can make your entire cloud appear slow. A virtual system’s internal performance will play a factor in a company’s productivity, and the efficiencies that the cloud offers can allow an IT team to streamline their responsibilities and save costs.
By providing advantages in all three of these areas, the cloud is continuing to become an IT standard, yet realizing its benefits depends on choosing the right provider.
Cloud Spectator’s Public Cloud Comparisons
In a recent study conducted by the tech analytics firm Cloud Spectator, top VM providers Expedient, Amazon Web Service, and Microsoft Azure were compared to determine who delivers the best performance when it comes to the above metrics. The study examined the providers’ services through the lens of the price-performance ratio, which evaluates the quality of a service in relation to its price.
When it came to vCPUs, storage disks, and internal networks, Expedient outperformed the others, and in some cases by a wide margin. Expedient’s storage performance was rated as being 8 to 32 times greater than the competitors, and its internal network score proved to be 39% higher than Microsoft’s and 46% higher than Amazon’s.
The overall results showed that Expedient’s services excelled in providing quality performance in relation to cost. For businesses interested in moving their IT infrastructure to the cloud, knowing who provides top-rated services will help in making a choice and getting the most value from a provider.
Getting the Best Performance from Your IT System
Every company will take its own approach toward evaluating its cloud infrastructure, centering on the network’s most important functions. Yet whatever the leading concerns are, certain essential metrics should be part of any IT evaluation.
By using the above three areas as a foundation for an overall IT evaluation, a business can lay the foundation for a reliable infrastructure. For those who are considering a cloud-based approach to their IT network, or those looking for a better provider, Expedient will deliver industry-leading cloud services that can allow a company to have the capacity, speed, and dependability it needs to keep IT operations efficient and achieve business goals, both now and for the future.
This post concludes a four-part series discussing the performance of Expedient virtual machines compared to the offerings of several public cloud providers. Click here to read the study.
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