Quantifying business service performance can represent a bit of a challenge for IT organizations supporting sophisticated environments and relying on external service providers in part to deliver IT services to end users and customers. The Service Measurement Index (SMI) could be the answer for high-tech organizations struggling to understand how services perform across hybrid cloud environments.

The growing popularity of cloud computing and the trend toward sending services outside of the company is causing some to wonder how they can gage performance off premise. Some companies are opting to develop private clouds, others rely mostly on public cloud offerings, but many are choosing the third option: hybrid cloud environments. That means not only are IT organizations providing business services across an internal infrastructure, but they are also depending upon third parties to deliver services to end users and customers. While there may be obvious operational, cost and other benefits, monitoring and measuring the performance of these services across disparate environments could stump some IT leaders and prevent them from realizing the full value of cloud services.

This problem certainly isn’t new, even if it is taking a fresh form under the cloud moniker. Applications teams have long worked toward better understanding application performance, in particular, from the end-user perspective. Efforts put into measuring how an internal user might encounter an application versus someone logging in remotely help those teams design better applications. And network teams would have to determine how an Internet service provider impacted the speed of the network across multiple locations from the local-area to the wide-area network. These types of measurement efforts and performance metrics now must be applied to the cloud.