* Consulting firm INS examines the performance payoff when enterprises conduct proper application evaluations prior to deployment
In a case of private life colliding with professional life, I came across two completely different surveys recently that reached similar conclusions: Many of us fail to take preventative steps we know we should.
I was doing some digging on the Web to research a dental issue, and I stumbled across an article about flossing. Most consumers are well aware of the importance of flossing teeth daily. Yet estimates in the dental world suggest that anywhere from 30% to 70% of Americans don’t floss regularly. The main reasons? It is too time consuming, people forget, and people are too lazy.
When I read the article I thought of a research report that highlighted how much time enterprises waste fixing application performance problems that might have been avoided if proper design steps had been taken early in the process.
Research and consulting firm INS prepared the report, released last month, which found just 26% of respondents always conduct comprehensive impact assessments, prior to deployment, to gauge how enterprise applications might have an effect on technical and business conditions once in production.
The purpose of an impact assessment is to identify the sensitivity of an application to underlying network, server, database and storage systems performance, as well as predict response times, throughput and needed capacity, according to INS.
There’s a clear need for such information: More than one-third of new or upgraded enterprise applications fail to meet initial performance expectations, INS says. Nearly two-thirds of those performance shortfalls can be corrected by final deployment, but not without extra work.
The most common method for correcting performance problems is application tuning, which 76% of respondents to the INS survey say they do. Respondents also often wind up increasing server capacity to improve performance (cited by 44% of respondents) and increasing network bandwidth (36%).
Those that do perform impact assessments before deploying applications say the main benefits of this practice are the chance to identify application deficiencies, spot network bottlenecks and define expected end-user response times pre-deployment.
“Too often, application performance issues are resolved by spending more on bandwidth and server capacity instead of modifying the application for improved efficiency,” wrote Rick Blum, senior manager of strategic marketing at INS, in the report. “This happens primarily because the application is rolled out without leaving sufficient time for adequate performance testing and modifications. Instead, money is wasted on the quick fix of increasing server and network capacity. Unfortunately, performance is too often viewed as something that can be solved after the application is put in production.”
So why don’t all companies perform pre-deployment impact assessments? Many IT organizations don’t have adequate processes in place to support the assessment, INS says. Cost, lack of tools and lack of expertise are also factors.
While money is always a consideration for budget-conscious enterprises, the payback a company can get in improved resource efficiency often will more than justify the investment in a thorough pre-deployment application evaluation. Just like flossing daily can prevent some painful, expensive dental treatments down the road. But I guess it’s human nature to cut corners even when we know we may have to pay for it later.
