BANGALORE, INDIA: The Internet cloud is not like a private network offered by a service provider and does not come with SLAs of performance and availability. The Internet is a network-of-networks, consisting of over ten thousand individual network providers. And unlike traffic carried within a private-WAN, these network providers are not economically motivated to optimally route Internet traffic generated by an on-demand cloud computing service.

To make matters worse, other protocols used to govern Web application delivery such as the chatty TCP protocol for transport and HTTP for applications introduce new application performance bottlenecks for distributed users of on-demand cloud based applications. Users far away from cloud computing infrastructure will experience slower response time and worse availability than those users close to the resources.

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And the Internet opens new security vulnerabilities ranging from Domain Name Server (DNS) and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to more advanced malicious activities exposing application-specific vulnerabilities. The security challenge is very real. Website and application attacks, such as SQL injections and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks infect thousands of Web properties every year.

Cloud optimization services

Cloud optimization services provide performance, availability, reliability and scale for the components of cloud computing. They enable cloud offerings to operate across an unpredictable and unreliable Internet while delivering the robust levels of service required by enterprises.

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Without optimization services, cloud offerings are at the mercy of the Internet and its many bottlenecks --and the resulting poor performance has a direct impact on the bottom line. A site or application leveraging Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) components that fail to scale for a flash crowd will lose customers and revenue. These services also allow you to extend the security of the data center out to the cloud.

Thus, cloud optimization is essential for cloud computing services to be able to meet enterprise computing requirements. As computing moves into the public cloud, and as private clouds scale to provide global access, Cloud Optimization Services will be required to deliver the rigorous level of performance and scalability needed for enterprises to realize the promise of cloud computing. These services must go well beyond CDN caching technologies to speed up delivery of dynamic content in order to remove these cloud-based barriers.

Next phase of growth for cloud

The continuing rise of interactive, chatty Web applications and the explosive growth of mobile applications are placing new demands on businesses data centers and Internet infrastructure. The market is becoming increasingly mobile. The mobile Internet is ramping faster than the desktop Internet did, and we believe more users will connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.

(With inputs from M.C.Ramesh, Sr. Director, Global Service and Support, Akamai Technologies)