It’s all about the cloud. Organizations of all sizes are developing and implementing new cloud- based services such as hosted email, online data back-up and online financial services. With a new service, comes new network performance challenges. Traditional tools and infrastructure were not designed to manage the demands of the new cloud based services. Investing time, energy and money into cloud services can all be wasted if IT teams cannot assure the network is prepared to support the new cloud services.

Alongside security, network performance is one of the biggest stumbling blocks when it comes to the deployment of cloud services. The performance lifecycle between the cloud and the consumers must be managed in real time with full visibility. IT teams cannot guarantee the performance of cloud services without the critical visibility into the network paths, whether managed or un-managed.

So what are some of the most common performance challenges when deploying cloud services?

• Proximity-induced latency is a critical flaw on the Internet for Cloud-based applications – performance degrades with distance
• Cloud computing requires IT to completely change their existing network infrastructure and approach to network monitoring
• Loss of control over servers – data is hosted in the cloud and you have to trust the provider that it is safe. Many cloud computing services offer SLAs that promise to deliver a level of service – failure of the cloud service could result in a loss of your data.
• Performance dependent on shared virtualized infrastructure; impacted by other users of the service.
• Lack of visibility into service delivery paths and server infrastructure.

Before considering a move to the cloud, your IT team must know the capacity of the bandwidth between one location and the cloud provider infrastructure. ISPs reserve capacity for management traffic and framing overhead of application protocols used which can reduce the total amount of achievable bandwidth.

As Gartner recently pointed out, “Cloud-optimized solutions are designed to take full advantage of the global-class characteristics of cloud computing platforms. Horizontal scalability, fault tolerance, high performance, efficiency and ease of interoperability are several of the key principles.” Availability problems result extended time-to-value and increased costs.

If you are responsible for an upcoming cloud service deployment, it is critical to do a pre-deployment assessment to better understand network bandwidth capacity and baseline performance issues.

A post deployment assessment will let you see how your is performing once the cloud services have been deployed; and of course, it is important to implement a continuous performance monitoring service so that you can always have an eye on your services from the end users perspective. Interested in learning more? Read the complete white paper Moving to the Cloud – Why Hope is Not a Strategy or get a free trial of PathView Cloud started today.