Fusion PPT’s article “Application Optimization in a Hybrid World,” written by CEO Michael Biddick, has been featured on the cover of the November issue of Network Computing Magazine. Biddick, an expert in the field of cloud computing who has authored a book on “Federal Cloud Computing” and written over 50 articles on cloud-related topics, provides his insight on optimizing the performance of applications running in federated cloud computing environments.

In InformationWeek’s recent “State of Cloud Computing” Survey, 40% of respondents said that they already use cloud services. Out of that number, nearly 80% said that they use multiple cloud providers, sometimes six or more at once. This is up 7 points from 2011. Clearly, the future lies in federated cloud infrastructures – these hybrid architectures simplify disaster recovery and continuity-of-operations (COOP) efforts, and promote the high availability and mobility of applications. However, applications and data that are spread across multiple clouds are fragmented, and trying to centrally control everything can cause severe management and orchestration headaches.

The first challenge, according to Biddick, is to get your organization’s applications into a federated cloud environment, without having to rewrite massive amounts of code. As you can probably imagine, this isn’t an easy task. “Federation should mean that IT can administer applications in one or more clouds as if they were running locally, using familiar tools and processes,” writes Biddick. “It’s a nice thought. But in the real world, cloud computing involves isolated environments that have to be monitored and managed individually.”

To tackle this daunting task, Biddick advocates using new management tools that are designed specifically for monitoring applications in federated environments. Biddick continues, “The benefit is that, using consistent tools and policies, applications and services can be managed with the same levels of flexibility, security and control regardless of location.”

In his article, Biddick analyzes the problems that accompany running a federated cloud architecture, and provides some advice and useful tool suggestions for getting top application performance. “The goal of application optimization is pretty simple,” Biddick continues, “to create a unified dashboard that displays the overall health of an organizations IT services and a holistic view of the environment in real time.”

To read the entire article, please click here.