Three pillars of an optimized cloud

USA: As businesses begin their journey into the Cloud, enterprise IT architectures must adapt accordingly to support these new services. In these new "hybrid cloud" architectures, performance is a complex beast to tame, especially with bandwidth and performance challenges popping up in all new places.

The consequent impacts on unprepared businesses can make next generation IT services fall apart in a world where every mile could be the last one. At the same time, the sprawl of virtualized and growing web applications across corporate campuses are filling WAN links with all manner of new collaboration exchanges, simultaneous and redundant session traffic and multi-point interactions. The challenges are more difficult than ever, as they are a combination of private and public applications, data traffic and connectivity.

In the face of these challenges, there are rapidly emerging and loud demands for solutions and expertise in optimizing business connectivity. It takes the right connectivity to weave the hybrid cloud's diverse set of services together efficiently and responsively, and weave them together in such a way that the business can be intelligent and gain the benefits of cloud-based IT services, without suffering the related performance penalty.

Cloud-optimized businesses will therefore require more than just fast pipes. They will need an integrated combination of technologies that are designed to simultaneously address private WAN optimization and public cloud service acceleration and the complex intersection of those two technologies beneath major sets of strategic IT services. The following three fundamental pillars must be addressed in bringing these capabilities together for the right infrastructure foundation beneath the hybrid cloud.

Connection: The cloud is all about connection. Some cloud traffic will inevitably be more important than other traffic, and this will constantly change. Amidst this whirlwind, connections will require optimization to work across limited physical links.

Insight: In the midst of dynamic connections, businesses require insight and a platform for proactive application-aware performance management. Irrespective of how well optimization may adapt to changing cloud uses, businesses will need to interact with connectivity more than ever before.

Content: While the connection is fundamental to the use of the cloud, interaction with the cloud is today, more content-centric than in the past. Much like we have done with ever faster processors, and ever cheaper memory, inefficient connectivity solutions may deal with a deluge of content by throwing more connections and bandwidth at it. Optimally delivering cloud services requires a foundation for efficiently bridging the gap between where content originates, and where content is used, with application-level awareness.

These three pillars woven together into a well-integrated, distributed performance acceleration architecture can place the right data in the right place at the right time, and overcome the challenges imposed by the cloud.

The hybrid cloud is a tremendous blender of digital interaction and it takes distributed, intelligent and automated optimization to contour the resulting flurry of digital bits into business class services.

In this age of the cloud, we are constantly casting about the market looking for vendors poised to deliver ideal integration of cloud optimization technologies. With a shift to applications from anywhere, the cloud requires connection optimization that reaches into applications and data to deliver access and usability that delivers high performance to any user, anywhere.

Shifting to the next generation of IT architecture - comprising a hybrid mix of IT solutions, drawn from private and public infrastructures - will require nothing short of a wholesale intervention in how companies steer and manage their IT infrastructure, and in no domain will this have deeper impact than in the network.

Successful uptake of cloud-based IT services will require the right foundation for visibility, performance and operational performance control. Riverbed delivers solutions that address these challenges, deeply and broadly enough to provide that foundation, for IT architectures both today and tomorrow.

The author is Marketing Evangelist, APAC & Japan, Riverbed Technology.