Net Performance A Growing Concern In Cloud Deployments
As enterprise cloud deployments continue to rise, so too do concerns about network performance, concludes an enterprise cloud study by the largest of network providers, Verizon.
In its annual cloud market study, the giant carrier highlighted network performance as a potential stumbling block as enterprise cloud deployments reach stratospheric heights. The cloud adoption numbers are impressive: Verizon estimates that 65 percent of companies surveyed have shifted to the cloud while 71 percent of its customers are running "external-facing production applications" in the cloud.
That total is up from 60 percent last year's survey, Verizon said.
Still, the latest cloud survey found that through 2015, at least 50 percent of cloud deployments would face performance issues. Cloud "performance and availability depend on more than just the quality of the datacenter," concludes the Verizon report, released this week. "The quality, capacity, security and intelligence of the networks that connect the end user to the applications and their associated data are just as important."
Moreover, the survey found that 84 percent of respondents rated network "uptime" as "very important" to their cloud operations. Indeed, performance ranked higher than considerations like ease of use, the survey found.
The findings are being used by the carrier to make the case that an elastic network is as critical to cloud infrastructure as state-of-the-art datacenters. "Network requirements should be included as a key attribute of each cloud workload’s configuration, just like security, processor, storage and memory requirements," Verizon argued in the report. "The network links should be configured in tandem with the cloud instance itself, and as the workload changes, so should the network."
Emerging software defined networking (SDN) is increasingly seen as the means to accomplish this reconfiguring. But the study notes that SDN deployments have so far largely been limited to the core networks of leading carriers like Verizon and some datacenter fabrics.
Among the Verizon survey's other key findings are:
- Nearly one third of enterprise respondents (32 percent) said "business agility" was the primary motive for shifting to the cloud. Only 14 percent cited cost.
- Enterprise spending on cloud deployments grew 38 percent over the last year.
- More than 80 percent of enterprise cloud budgets are managed by IT departments while CIOs control half of all cloud spending. Those findings prompted the report's authors to declare that "IT is back in the driver's seat" when it comes to cloud deployments.
- Some 41 percent of enterprises said they are using infrastructure-as-a-service for mission-critical workloads. Meanwhile, 72 percent of respondents said they expect to shift more than half their workloads to the cloud by 2017, up from 58 percent today.
The report's findings were drawn from a Verizon survey of its enterprise cloud customers (181 respondents) along with market research commissioned Verizon earlier this year that attracted 988 responses.
