Facing cloud computing: Is your network ready?

According to Gartner Research data, in 2010, cloud services in the world market total of 68 billion U.S. dollars, a 16.6% increase in 2009, this gives operators a huge opportunity, but also to the network management challenges. Corporate network managers are traditionally focused on providing a stable infrastructure, managing the various requirements on the network, and maintaining business uptime. After entering the "cloud age", software as a service (SaaS), virtualization, data center consolidation and so on benefit from this kind of it transformation opportunities, and suddenly, the role of network and network managers changed dramatically. Now CIOs want to take advantage of the cost and efficiency benefits of cloud computing. Communication Service providers can use this opportunity to provide value-added services to corporate customers while countering the erosion of traditional MPLS revenues. A Communications Service provider (CSP) as a corporate network, host devices and vendors of specific business applications (such as video conferencing, unified communications, and signage), communication service providers are fully qualified to help companies migrate to the cloud, but they face competitive pressures from large system integrators such as IBM and CSC. To provide a corporate network capable of dealing with the different needs of cloud computing, operators have shifted from providing commercial MPLS networks, which are largely focused on price, to providing a driving product that can tap into the value of the cloud. This provides a communication service provider with an opportunity to increase profitability, win new business, and reduce customer churn. Cloud Computing's network challenges cloud Computing has many different definitions, but it is mainly about the concept of thin-client computing, where applications and computing infrastructures are delivered to users as services over the network. This trend brings pressure on the WAN. Applications such as SAP, Oracle, Unified Communications, VoIP, and network truth have different performance parameters, and the WAN handles them appropriately, thus dramatically increasing the challenge of allocating bandwidth and network resources. In addition, CIOs need to ensure the performance of each application at a single user level, not at the network level. Businesses use more and more of their services from private cloud and public cloud, for example, Google's enterprise application portfolio is hosted in an unknown location, delivered via the public Internet. This trend is driving companies to use hybrid MPLS, Ethernet and internet-based Ip-vpn. Multiple networks that provide more and more applications bring in the need for intelligent intelligence within the network. For example, which application should give priority at peak times? Which network should I use? What is the acceptable latency for unified communications services? The Processing branch office branch is no longer just communicating with a handful of local servers hosting all of its applications, and now branch offices get applications from the public cloud and private cloud, for example, Salesforce or Google Apps are located in an unknown data center. The branch office is acquiring information from multiple sources and transferring data to multiple locations at a distance, which undoubtedly adds complexity.