Cloudification

SolarWinds is seeing customers increasingly "cloudify" their existing business applications.

It's important to remember that the customer still hosts the core of those applications, and the application architecture isn't changing, Dada said. "They're just offloading services, especially those that deliver the benefits of geographic distribution."

Think of websites employing content-delivery networks to serve images and videos, cloud-based firewalls, or high availability and disaster-recovery functions.

Unless you own multiple data centers, those functions are difficult to achieve, but cloud services make them readily accessible, Dada said.

The ability to clone applications, maintain snapshots, synchronize databases and make copies, all in real-time, makes "cloudifying" an option that can bypass some of the challenges associated with rebuilding applications from scratch.