LATEST INTELLIGENCE
Devising a Cloud
Strategy that Doesn’t
Cast a Shadow on App
Performance IT Evolution to a Hybrid
Enterprise Drives the Need
for Location-Independent
Computing
The move to the cloud comes with visions of always
on applications, happy, productive users, and anytime,
anywhere access. It touts itself as the answer to all of
your on-premises application problems, providing a highly
scalable and secure infrastructure on which to host your
most critical applications. But that same move is actually
burdened by performance issues like low response times or
high latency, at a time in our industry when users have the
highest level of expectation around application speed and
availability. Performance is the penalty that you pay in
exchange for the agility, flexibility and cost savings of the
cloud. All this leads to poor end-user experience and can
cause a resulting negative impact on the organization’s
ability to operate efficiently and effectively. Enterprise IT has gone through several waves of evolution since
the birth of computing. The computing platform has evolved from
mainframe computing to minicomputers, shifted to client/server
computing, and finally moved to Internet computing in the cloud
era. Each transition saw computing evolve in the following ways:
• The cost of computing fell by orders of magnitude, enabling
businesses to deploy more compute resources to handle
almost every business process.
• The primary computing location has continued to change.
Compute resources have shifted from the data center to the
campus and branch office, back to the data center, and now
to endpoints and the cloud. IT has had to continually adapt as
the primary compute location has changed.
• The network has continued to grow in importance with each
successive compute transition. Historically, the network has tied
all of the compute resources together. The network plays a more
important role today, though, as increasingly more applications
have become network centric. The network can optimize
application flows and provide the necessary visibility required to
manage emerging compute models such as mobile and cloud.
• Core network infrastructure has expanded. Historically, routers
and switches were the building blocks of the network because
they created the connections between points. However,
connectivity alone isn’t enough to run the business efficiently.
The network must provide users with an optimized experience
to maximize productivity. Because of this, technology such as
WAN optimization and network management tools now must
be considered core network infrastructure.
Whether you’re moving to the cloud, or are already there
and are trying to figure out a better way to do the cloud,
the question becomes is there a way to utilize the cloud
that ensures the highest level of performance possible?
You fall neatly into one of two camps when reading this
paper — either you have an application on-premises and
are looking for the best way to move to the cloud, or you
are already in the cloud and are experiencing performance
issues, causing you to look for a better way. Regardless
of which camp you belong to, you’re still in the same
position of looking for the right way to have an application
hosted in the cloud with the highest level of achievable
performance possible.
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