BrandPost: Is Your IT Environment a Barrier to the Cloud?
The promise of cloud services as the means of delivering applications and services is quite attractive. However, in the rush to adopt cloud services, a few myths have been created that can lead to bad decisions and botched implementations. One myth that has created more problems than most is the belief that, by using the cloud, a company doesn’t have to worry about its on-premises IT infrastructure or the support systems for it.
The assertion that cloud service providers “handle everything” is not really true. They provide access to the services as long as your equipment can get you to their data center. While this may reduce the load on your servers and potentially your storage hardware, in many instances using the cloud creates a need for new networking hardware to support much higher wide-area network (WAN) utilization both in terms of number of users and the amount of data traffic. When companies want to use multiple network carriers for cost, reliability, and performance issues, the result may be more network hardware than initially expected.