BoxIntense, managed hosting services provider, is now offering New Relic Standard free of charge to its customers.  New Relic is a web application performance management provider, combining real user, application and availability monitoring in one solution.  The New Relic Standard add-on creates an all in one solution for BoxIntense, allowing customers to monitor and manage their cloud apps to optimize performance and success.

The Top Six Cloud Pitfalls to Avoid in 2011:

• Underestimating How Bad Cloud Sprawl Can Be: Provisioning in the cloud is convenient and quick which provides both agility and a huge potential for abuse. Migrating too much or moving too quickly can lead to complete loss of control by IT and exponential costs. Remember Virtual sprawl? Times that by 50. Additionally, it will become even tougher to monitor and report on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) as applications move between physical, virtual and cloud environments. On top of that you may be required to purchase individual point tools to manage it all.
• Failing to Monitor Performance Can Lead to a Lack of Employment: Visibility into application performance in the cloud is critical, especially with your user-facing applications. Whether it's Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), without cloud performance monitoring tools in place there is no visibility into how applications are performing. As an IT department, your lines of business will look disparagingly upon you if there is a lack of visibility into the performance of your services. If you can't monitor and report on cloud performance and availability, then you are not providing business value.
• Lack of Knowledge of the Cloud Services/Applications You Actually Support: As applications are provisioned to the cloud, it can be easy to miss what is actually running without proper tracking. Beware of getting caught in the "out of sight, out of mind" dilemma of losing track of applications residing on-premise or in the cloud. If applications get lost in the shuffle now, imagine the nightmare down the road when your cloud infrastructure grows even more complex.
• Perils of Platform Lock-in: Be sure to pick your cloud platform carefully and do your homework. Once you have chosen a cloud vendor and have provisioned applications, it is tough to move them elsewhere if you are unhappy with the performance or service. Cloud providers usually make it difficult to extract the data from their cloud and in many cases, a third party tool is needed to migrate that data back on-premise. Once you have signed the dotted line, you are essentially locked-in.
• Mismanaged Performance Guarantees: Once in the cloud, applications are at the mercy of the platform now carrying them. For instance, performance latency can be caused by the simple geographical location of the servers your applications are now housed on. As the IT team, you will need to set expectations both internally and externally concerning how applications will perform, taking into consideration those on-premise applications vs. those that run in the cloud.
• Compromised Privacy and Security: A challenge to running applications in the cloud is knowing where the server that now houses your applications is physically located. There could be jurisdiction issues associated with the applications that you have running in the cloud based on the location of those new servers. Also, the IT person running those servers in the cloud may not understand the sensitivity of the data you have handed over. Remember, your company information is in the hands of someone outside your company wall and unless the correct processes and performance monitoring are in place, your critical data it is at the mercy of the cloud.