Security concerns (real and imagined) have long dominated much of the cloud conversation and caused many companies to deliberate about getting started in the cloud. Slowly, the security issues are being addressed--through the adoption of corporate policies for cloud usage, maturing cloud provider offerings, and by technologies such as CloudSwitch which isolate and encrypt all cloud resources to meet the requirements of the CSO. But while the focus has been on cloud security, another potential bottleneck is on the horizon as companies start using the cloud in more substantial ways.
In our discussions with IT executives and their teams, we’ve been hearing about a new concern: the ability of corporate networks to handle cloud traffic. Network performance is a lurking issue that hasn’t yet received the attention it deserves. That’s understandable, since bandwidth is rarely a problem for companies exploring the cloud in a small way, where they may deploy a few experimental VMs in order to understand the process. But as they start expanding their cloud footprint and running production-oriented applications, data movement takes on a completely different scale. As enterprises start to move real workloads out to the cloud (or to straddle internal and external clouds), look for network performance to become top of mind.
IT professionals and developers often assume they have huge network capacity, and it’s probably ample for their current Internet usage or the small cloud projects they may have tried so far. But what will happen, for example, when you have dozens of developers all trying to use cloud resources? Or if you put high-transaction processes in the cloud that need to “talk back” to your data center? What if you are trying to move a lot of video or graphics between your business users and the cloud? Network usage is about to get much more demanding, and the traffic will need to flow without bottlenecks (or saturating the network) for an organization’s cloud strategy to work.
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