Applications don't interfere with cloud adoption... it's the network!

Last week on TechTarget's Cloud Computing web site, Carl Brooks wrote a piece where he interviewed some IT people in the financial services and other IT-hungry industries about their use of Cloud Computing.  His and their conclusion is that cloud computing adoption will be limited by the performance that critical applications can expect when connecting to remote cloud-based resources.

In the article, he discusses other issues such as the quantity of applications in a typical enterprise IT organization and the infrequency with which older applications get retired.  The migration of applications that were originally written for local environments to cloud environments is another area of discussion. 

Obviously application performance is a major success factor in a pretty much any major IT project, including cloud migration. While Riverbed can't help with migration or reduction of applications, we can most definitely help with issues around application performance when those applications are deployed across a WAN. 

If users are in one or more locations remote to the data center where applications are deployed, then it's a call for Riverbed Steelhead appliances.  We used to call that architecture distributed computing, but nowadays, it's called a Private Cloud.  If you have physical access to both sides of the connection, then Steelhead appliances are the way to go.

If you have applications and other services within Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environments, then you can get the same kind of performance improvement with Cloud Steelhead.  Since you can't physically enter Amazon's data center and install a Steelhead appliance, a different approach is required, and that's what Cloud Steelhead gives you. 

And if you've got a hybrid cloud (which is really the most common arrangement, after all), you'll need a hybrid solution.  But the bottom line is that if you've got distant computing resources, private or public, then you need WAN Optimization to make sure that your users get the kind of performance that they need to be successful and happy.

Regardless of the architecture, Riverbed will make sure you get the most out of your remote applications.