In talking to companies that are at various stages of making the leap to the cloud, invariably the biggest concern is trust. They want to know that their transactions and interactions with customers will be secure, in compliance and performing at optimal speeds with zero disruption. These are big issues and they’re not to be taken lightly for sure.
The essential element for building trust around these concerns is visibility. Companies today wouldn’t create a Web page without providing analytics around who is accessing their site, and companies opening APIs to the cloud need to have this same visibility into “who” and “how” services are accessed. Visibility gives businesses the ability to see who their best and worst customers are and figure out how to meter the service for billing, how to enforce SLAs, and tier service levels. This insight allows them to guarantee that any cloud service or SaaS API is just as robust and healthy as any internal application or service.
A good example of how this really affects businesses is a media company that is looking to open up its content to the cloud. This company must have visibility into who will provide a revenue channel for distributing content. Releasing content to the cloud without this visibility and insight would leave them vulnerable to losing possible revenue channels. Here, visibility is crucial to both sides of the service so that the media company can see where to best release its content and also trace who and how people access it in the open cloud.
The takeaway here is that visibility is key for trusting the cloud – it gives insight into API metrics and allows companies to understand and map performance to consumers use.
