Network stability needed on both sides of the cloud
By Chris Taylor
25/08/2011
As more enterprises invest into the cloud, analysts are warning that firms increasingly need comprehensive network management solutions.
Cloud computing, or the remote storage of data and online applications, has presented firms with new challenges, reports Computing.co.uk.
These include building and maintaining IT infrastructures, data protection issues and keeping service level agreements or contracts.
The main issues, says Nathan Bishop, director of service delivery for home insurance and maintenance group HomeServe, surround downtime and latency - which are affected by strains on bandwidth. "A lot of people will buy a public cloud service because of the low cost to entry," says Bishop.
"When you are reliant on a public internet, you have to think about the network at your end, whether you can buy some services at the cloud end to improve performance, and make sure you have a virtual back-to-back connection," he added.
However, it was also suggested that the network architecture itself is compounding latency rather than it purely being a bandwidth capability issue.
Mike Spink, founder of cloud computing consultancy firm Nephologic, was of this opinion and cited so-called "fat client" IT models which can contribute toward latency problems when bringing data back from a local network.
"If you are running a fat client model over the internet, it will not work very well - you are almost certainly going to have bandwidth and latency problems," pitched in Spink, who was cited by KantaraInitiative.org.
