The kinds of services we can deliver via a cloud model has absolutely diversified over just the last few years. We’re now pushing down rich content, a variety of applications, and a lot of new use cases. The reality here is that cloud will continue to grow as more users and verticals adopt this very versatile platform. In fact, global spending on IaaS is expected to reach almost $16.5 billion in 2015, an increase of 32.8 percent from 2014, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2014 to 2019 forecast at 29.1 percent, according to Gartner. The report goes on to state that over time, as a business becomes more comfortable with the use of IaaS, organizations, especially in the midmarket, will eventually migrate away from running their own data centers in favor of relying primarily on infrastructure in the cloud.
This future cloud model certainly bodes well for new kinds of applications and a richer device playing field. Organizations will be able to push down all sorts of new content while still creating secure policies, enabling the user, and pushing their own business forward. However, with the growth of cloud and all of these new data points, there are some realities to talk about as well. Consider the following:
- Content is getting richer, larger, and a lot more diverse.
- Gartner forecasts that 4.9 billion connected things will be in use in 2015, up 30 percent from 2014, and will reach 25 billion by 2020.
- More organizations are finding even more use cases for cloud.
- Global markets are shifting the dynamic competitive landscape of the cloud.
- Cloud services continue to evolve to encompass evolving demands.
These are important points to remember simply because the speed at which you can deliver content will dictate your position in your market.Pushing down services and content (like applications) is critical to keep the business moving forward and maintaining user productivity. In the past, creating optimizations was tedious and required serious hardware investments. Plus, capabilities around cross-connecting cloud and data center resources was still a bit of a challenge.
Today, however, cloud optimization and WANOP have gone through some serious generational evolutions. What you can do with intelligent WANOP systems far exceeds the capabilities of the past, and it’s much easier to deploy.
- WANOP as a virtual service. You no longer have to invest in a hardware appliance. You can now test, deploy, and even utilize entire virtual WANOP platforms for your organization. With that in mind, I’m certainly not suggesting that you take out your current physical appliances. In fact, in cases of massive throughput or the need for hardware acceleration, physical appliances are still great. Still, you can import entire WANOP virtual appliances into your hypervisor and allow it to control, optimize, and shape your traffic. This is great for cloud instances, smaller branches, or even enterprise data centers with specific WANOP use-cases. Here’s the important piece: it’s not hard to deploy. At the very least, testing a new virtual WANOP appliance has become much easier.
- Cloud, WAN and link aggregation. You’re not just trying to optimize traffic when working with modern WANOP technologies. New platforms (even the virtual ones) now allow you to aggregate links to optimize traffic and bandwidth. Furthermore, you can integrate your WANOP appliance with internal system to do link aggregation and even failover. Now, WANOP is not just optimization. It also helps with disaster recovery and business continuity. You can aggregate cellular, wireless, wired, and even MPLS links together to create better WAN utilization as well as greater failover capabilities. The amazing part is that all of this can be controlled from the virtual layer.
- WANOP is evolving cloud networking. WAN optimization and link control is now a direct part of the data center, cloud, and networking conversation. As a virtual appliance, a WANOP controller has access to all network resources being presented to the infrastructure. Now, with SDN and other networking controllers integrating WANOP is easier than ever. The important thing to understand is that as a key piece around cloud technology, controlling WAN traffic allows you to dynamically influence content delivery and the user experience. Very soon you’ll see even more applications and data sets delivered via the cloud. The stay competitive, it’ll be important to deploy technologies which allow you control the traffic that gets sent out and the requests that are coming in. Integrating WANOP with virtualization, cloud, and your data center will show you a new way to analyze and optimize traffic.
At this point, if you’re experiencing any sort of cloud challenge around delivery, control or optimizing an experience, you should look at WANOP. As mentioned earlier, these systems can now be deployed as virtual appliances for testing. Delivering enterprise capabilities to any organization with some kind of virtual footprint is easier than ever before. These technologies are allowing for more businesses to compete at a higher level. The key is knowing about these platforms, testing them out, and applying them to the right business use cases. As cloud evolves, so should your organization. Using WANOP technologies for link aggregation, traffic shaping, and overall optimization not only helps your business, it also creates a much happier user.
