Keysight: How to Overcome the Darkside of Moving Apps to the Cloud

First up, the paper kicks off by acknowledging the big promise of public cloud platforms: faster time-to-market, flexibility, scalable business apps, and so on. But it quickly pulls back the curtain and warns that many organizations hit a “dark side” — unexpected performance issues, runaway costs, downtime, and diminished ROI. In fact, the data shows a hefty chunk of companies are already pulling workloads back on-premises because the cloud move didn’t go as expected.

Then, it digs into the root of the issues. A big culprit: organizations leap into the cloud without a clear strategy for which apps should move and why. That can lead to costly cycles of move → undo → re-move. It also lists core problem areas: security concerns, performance degradation, vendor lock-in, multi-cloud complexity, and hidden costs. The paper emphasizes that the cloud isn’t automatically better just because “cloud” sounds good — you still need to plan thoughtfully.

The next part of the paper deals with getting visibility and monitoring in place. If you move apps to the cloud (or mix cloud + on-premises), you must still see what’s going on: traffic, latency, application performance, security anomalies. Without that visibility you’re flying blind and can’t detect problems or validate that your cloud provider is delivering. It talks about building a three-layer visibility architecture (data access, control plane, monitoring layer) plus active monitoring tools and synthetic tests to stress applications and ensure SLAs really hold up.

Finally, the paper offers a pragmatic conclusion: there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. If cloud doesn’t make sense for some workloads, moving them back on-premises or using a hybrid model might be the best move. The goal is to pick the right tool for the right job, not just chase hype. It emphasizes that visibility isn’t optional — you must have a scalable architecture for it — and that a hybrid approach may give you the flexibility to harness cloud benefits when they work, and keep control when they don’t.

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