Twin Lights Group: Blogspace

Connectivity In A Cloud Computing World

 

Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service, On-demand applications, Web 2.0  - whichever handle you wish to apply to it – continues to press forward as the next major development in IT.
The concept of leasing an application, hosted and managed by others, and delivered over the Web, offers customers many new benefits…small enterprises gain access to functionality they couldn’t previously afford, while large enterprises can align expenses with use, and control run-away technology costs. And all benefit from improved collaboration and new features provided by Web 2.0 technologies.
The trends are undeniable. CRM (Salesforce.com) was one of the first significant pioneers of SaaS functionality, proving enterprises will move critical functionality outside the firewall. And every day more applications are being launched through SaaS models while more and more enterprise users are signing up.  Gartner group estimates that 25 percent of new business software will be delivered via a SaaS model by 2011.
Yet, this mega-trend has hidden and significant consequences on the corporate network.

• Traffic patterns & traffic load change
• Lack of network redundancy becomes exposed
• Universal accessibility of these Web applications is expected
• Network performance planning becomes more critical

In fact, the network becomes the single greatest point of failure for IT management in ensuring optimized delivery of SaaS applications. However, when addressed properly, the benefits of SaaS solutions are experienced, in a seamless, highly efficient manner.

Changing Traffic Patterns
Typically, enterprise applications are hosted in the corporate data center, usually in the company’s head quarters or dedicated IT facility.  As companies subscribe to a growing number of on-demand solutions, these applications are ported to the SaaS providers’ platforms.  Companies access these providers’ platforms in generally one of two ways; Either over the Internet, or over private IP connections.

Impact – additional Internet bandwidth is required, or in the case of private
IP connectivity, the SaaS provider must be added to the company’s WAN

Network Redundancy
WAN networks are historically vulnerable to network outages due to environmental exposure of the access facilities. A storm downing a telephone poll or a back-hoe cutting into fiber can bring the network down. Historically, this impacted the remote users, but the people in the office could continue to do their work, since the applications were hosted in their office.  However, with SaaS, this is no longer the case. Losing your network connectivity means office production comes to a halt. CRM, financial, and workflow systems cannot be reached.
This however can be easily addressed.  Today, network providers offer a variety of redundant access connectivity options ranging from physically diverse network connections riding separate access facilities and terminating on separate carrier routers, to wireless WAN connections.

Impact – diverse, redundant connections from your carrier should be added. If Internet is the primary
way of accessing these solutions, diverse carrier and access technologies should be explored.

Universal Access
A big promise of SaaS, or Web 2.0, applications is that they are universally accessible over the Web. We’ve addressed the fact that the corporate WANs must be adapted to account for this connectivity. But what about remote users?  Home users are easily addressed, and depending upon the company’s SaaS network model (public or private), they would access the applications over their home Internet connectivity or via their private corporate VPN.
It gets really exciting however, once you include the mobile users. The advances in the cellular provider connectivity and devices and Wi-Fi, make accessing your SaaS-enabled applications as easy as access the Internet today. Currently, phones and PDAs tend to require special agents or applications to access these web-based applications. However, with the promise of “Full” Internet browsers coming, connectivity becomes even more seamless.  And with the growing coverage of 3G cellular and Wi-Fi, all of these devices allow end users to easily “plug-in” from almost any location.

Impact – universal access is easily enabled. For the corporate and home users, it is transparent
to the WAN changes. For the mobile users, PDA users will require specific agents, that will
eventually go away, when PDAs/phones are enabled with “Full” Internet browsers.

Network Performance
The more applications company’s put into “the cloud”, the more networks become exposed by poor design and inferior service providers.  Traditionally, a proportionately high percentage of the IT budget would be spent on software, server and storage infrastructure and support.  The network, especially the WAN, was often short changed by companies, choosing to go with low cost providers and Internet-based VPNs.
However, as noted, the applications infrastructure costs go away with SaaS and are replaced by lower overall user fees. The network is now by definition, proportionately higher in cost and in importance and thusly deserves much greater attention. Network performance should be improved through a disciplined approach of planning and managing corporate WANs, and by leveraging higher quality service providers that incorporate technologies such as MPLS. MPLS-based WANs as the example, improve routing for distributed applications, and further enhance performance by leveraging application load-balancing and WAN acceleration technologies to quickly route and transport data to the proper on-demand applications. Bottom line, the criticality of your data deserves research into its delivery method.

Impact – Network performance is ever more critical as applications are ported out to “the cloud.” Investment in the planning and management of the network, leveraging new WAN technologies such as MPLS, are critical to the optimized delivery of SaaS applications.

Conclusion
The advent of SaaS, or On-demand applications offer companies exciting benefits; namely enterprise application functionality without the head-aches of managing the underlying server infrastructure and support. However, to maximize the end-users’ experience, the network must be revisited and highly scrutinized. We advocate a fresh look at “The Network” using best-in-class providers and related technologies . After all, in a SaaS world, the only meaningful data, is the data delivered.

 

Additional Reading

AT&T dives into cloud computing

Following the lead of IBM, Amazon, and Google, AT&T said it is entering the cloud computing market with the worldwide launch of a new service called AT&T Synaptic Hosting. AT&T is putting together the application hosting service with technology from USinternetworking and five datacenters located in the United States, Europe, and Asia. The company plans to add more to the cloud service over time... Link to full article