Brent Lees, Riverbed Technology

The evolution of cloud architectures and their ability to deliver a greater level of efficiency and flexibility has been a hot topic recently.

Ultimately, business priorities should drive the decision to use the cloud, not simply some arbitrary need to streamline IT resources. It’s evident that the business advantages of moving to the cloud are significant and provide sustaining benefits. One of the most compelling is elasticity – IT resources can automatically scale up and down as required by the business. The risks of under-provisioning and the costs of over-provisioning evaporate.

To better understand the business benefits of deploying applications in the cloud, let’s examine three compelling aspects:
1. Reduced complexity. Deploying applications in the cloud reduces the burden of hands-on system administration and allows you to spend more time thinking strategically.
2. Reduced costs. The two biggest savings realised by many organisations that move to the cloud come from economies of scale and a usage-based pricing model. Pay-as-you-go brings true capital cost savings, eliminating the need to invest in unused capacity while ensuring that spikes in demand don’t cripple your business.
3. Increased flexibility and agility. The cloud offers increased agility, dynamic scalability, and faster speed to market.

WHAT SHOULD I WORRY ABOUT IN THE CLOUD?

Performance, availability, and security top the list of concerns that our customers mention. Notably, these same concerns apply to on-premises implementations, too.

Application delivery solutions must similarly evolve to meet the requirements of large-scale distributed processing readily available in the cloud. Such requirements include:
· Enhancing efficiency and response times of applications and services;
· Improving availability between instances that span multiple geographic zones and regions;
· Solving latency problems with content optimisation and acceleration tools;
· Ensuring proper protection, using intelligent layer-7 inspection, against known and unknown threats; and
· Scaling resources to provide encryption and compression services without affecting performance.

About the author: Brent Lees is senior product manager at Riverbed Technology.