| NOTAS: | Enterprises have developed practices that minimize reliance on the external (wide area) network or WAN, which they view as expensive, hard to provision, and underperforming. While connections from data center to branch offices are unavoidable, many enterprises have only one centralized data center and no separate backup location. Those that do have multiple locations are dissatisfied with the performance of their connections despite using high-bandwidth connections such as 10G Ethernet.
Cloud service providers are aware of the issue. They believe the WAN is a barrier to the adoption of cloud services. Furthermore, they are concerned that growth of data will slow performance even more at the same time they seek to expand their offerings to a wider variety of services including cloud disaster recovery. Most IT departments have already virtualized some of their IT infrastructure and then hit a wall at the network. Service providers are beginning to address the issue with cloud-network
integrated (CNI) offerings that combine intelligent networking with cloud services – mostly with their own services although now we are seeing this cloud-network integration with third-party cloud offerings as well. |
