For many organizations, the use of public clouds has shifted from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to PaaS/SaaS. On one hand, this has allowed them to realize much faster application innovation and cost savings. But on the other, their transition from on-premises to cloud native or lift-and-shift is prolonged by having to operate in multiple interim environments while evolving to microservices. The transition period for large customer-facing applications can involve distributed operations, fragmented security, and inconsistent user experience.

At the same time, the public face of a business is its applications and websites, so the application experience is a huge determinant in the overall customer experience.