Moving to the cloud? Here are some factors to consider

BUSINESSES are moving to the cloud, and the trend is not likely to slow down anytime soon.

According to IDC, public cloud infrastructure quarterly revenue has more than doubled in the past three years to US$9.0 billion in 1Q18, growing 55.8 percent year over year.

Private cloud revenue reached US$3.9 billion for an annual increase of 26.5 percent.

The combined public and private cloud revenues now represent 46.1 percent of the total worldwide IT infrastructure spending, up from 41.8 percent a year ago.

Given how this infrastructure is as crucial to companies to deliver the services, as it was in the data center, ability to explore the different cloud networks to identify various choke points and issues with routing in advance will immensely help in making informed network investment decisions and subsequently, determining its configurations.

To ensure a successful migration to the cloud as well as sustained efficient operations, these are the several things that organizations need to consider before deploying;

#1 | Network’s baseline performance

In order to get a baseline measurement of network performance, organizations need to pick a different set of data points than they previously used.

Upon moving to IaaS, SaaS, or virtually any cloud services, companies will be at the mercy of cloud vendors and other third-party service providers on which applications and services traffic will be transmitted.

#2 | Aware of bottlenecks within the current infrastructure

Existing routing setups and configurations may render certain premises not optimal to tap into services and application over the cloud, and this could be due to geographical latency and regional bandwidth constraints.

For example, branches in certain countries may have a harder time accessing the same application as opposed to others due to the location of the servers.

#3 | Visual indicator of traffic paths

Being able to visualize the region within distributed networks that are troublesome greatly helps in identifying the root cause of an issue as well as provides crucial information into remediating the problems.

By deploying the combination of synthetic tests with ping and traceroute functionality, the traffic path of a cloud network can be mapped out, allowing engineers to run a reachability test for an endpoint via the clouds, as well as to figure out the route of a packet through a network and measure any delays in transmission.

#4 | Collaborate with SaaS and Cloud providers

Having all the pertinent information – visual indicators and diagnostics – and relaying them to the SaaS and IaaS providers in a simple manner allow for easy and seamless troubleshooting if the situation arises.

Being aware of the location of the issue and the reason for the problem enables immediate actions by appropriate parties to fix it.

#5 | Get things right before deployment

Trying out different routing options, beta testing a new application launch or even planning for a new data center become that much easier, with detailed maps and other metrics already in hand.

The valuable insights gained by engineers via testings overlaid with contextual data and detailed network map will help companies to understand the outcome and potential impact of changes before making them.

#6 | Constant monitoring of performance and impact

Continual monitoring of network performance and adding new information as they become available enables companies to keep watchful eyes against sluggish network performance while maintaining optimal end-user experience.

These tests can typically be conducted using the same methods and sources deployed to obtain baseline performance indicators.

In short, as companies become more dependant on the internet and move their critical operations to the cloud, having solid insights into the cloud network’s traffic and paths, could solve a lot of future problems and avoid unnecessary downtime.

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