Squeeze WAN providers now for a better cloud later
The network links to the cloud can be key to how cost-effective cloud use will be
Businesses should be formulating cloud strategies now that get the most out of their network providers to better support whatever cloud services they wind up buying, according to a prominent cloud-economics expert.
Latency, quality of service, and bandwidth on demand are some of the service characteristics businesses may already buy for their WAN connections that they will want to leverage as they move toward public cloud services, says Joe Weinman, founder of cloudonomics.com and a worldwide segment executive of HP's media and entertainment business.
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"Enterprises can leverage their existing private networks with the emerging set of service provider offers," says Weinman, whose book "Cloudonomics" is due out this spring.
Services that businesses already use to connect data centers, for example, could be economically expanded to connect to cloud storage services as well, reducing the threat that performance will deteriorate when cloud services are switched on, he says.
Technologies such as MPLS, VPLS and DWDM are available and can be called into service for cloud connectivity, he says.
Doing the math on cloud economics is more than simply whether the bottom line is less, he says. "When people talk about the business benefits of cloud the first thing that they always talk about is cost reduction, and that leads you inevitably to a hybrid architecture of enterprise data center with service-provider cloud resources being economically optimal," Weinman says.
Through writings on his website and in his upcoming book, Weinman demonstrates that cloud services make such good sense economically that hybrid cloud networks for businesses are inevitable.
Businesses that have steady demand for applications and data and also have in-house expertise may as well build their own clouds. But for those who lack expertise or whose demand spikes periodically may want to go with pay-per-use cloud services.
At first blush, pay-per-use prices may seem more expensive than owning the infrastructure, but if capital costs, idle capacity that is used infrequently and maintenance are factored in, cloud services as a supplement to owned infrastructure make sense.
