With a predicted adoption rate in South Africa of around 60% by 2013, an increasing number of organisations and individuals will be accessing their services, applications and infrastructure in the cloud in the near future.
Cloud applications should include guarantees for issues as diverse as acceptable delay, network availability and bandwidth allocation.
Martin May is regional director at Enterasys Networks
In embracing cloud technology, companies are realising reduced costs and improved productivity benefits in three key areas: virtualisation, software as a service (SaaS), and hosted mail.
The rapid adoption of cloud technologies is driving users to address a number of critical architecture requirements for cloud applications.
For example, traditional network equipment does not have the visibility into cloud content to ensure the cloud's pay-as-you-go and on-demand applications have the flexible network resources they depend on to meet performance expectations.
Cloud conscious
The corporate network needs to be transformed into a 'cloud-aware' network capable of ensuring a positive and productive user experience. To achieve this, the deployment of a cloud computing framework must be able to automatically provision and prioritise applications and users. This framework must provide all of the critical requirements for cloud applications.
As organisations move towards public and private clouds, scale out their virtualisation deployments and unify local and storage area network solutions, network predictability and visibility often deteriorate. To counter this, cloud applications should include guarantees for issues as diverse as acceptable delay, network availability and bandwidth allocation.
Cloud confidential
Perhaps equally important is security. A cloud application provider should be able to offer data privacy that encompasses physical, network, application and data-level security, as well as backup and disaster recovery.
A common interface that allows cloud technology users to verify that the security they expect is delivered via an open, extensible and secure set of interfaces is the Audit, Assertion, Assessment, and Assurance API, or 'A6' API.
At the same time, access to corporate data must be managed and secured while the data itself must be protected and partitioned accurately and absolutely.
Critically, cloud applications should allow the user complete control of the organisation's data, even if it is located off-site. Nothing should hinder the user's ability to import, export, purge and archive data - to and from the application.
Security is not possible without transparency, which is an important essential for new cloud technology adopters. Cloud service providers should be able to provide a transparent means for users to monitor the flow of corporate data and its storage locations at all times.
Today there are systems available capable of measuring the performance of applications deployed by cloud service providers. They are increasingly viewed as essential to the cloud fabric.
The ability to reduce infrastructure capital and operational expenditure (capex and opex) through network optimisation and automation is key. No investments should be required for hardware and software licence fees, and all implementation costs should be predictable with no hidden-cost surprises associated with subscription-based pricing.
Cloud service providers should be able to promote interoperability with existing network environments through the use of standards-based technology. With this in mind, and in order to reduce the costs, time and risks associated with integrating cloud applications, networks should ideally be built or upgraded incorporating existing on-premise and on-demand applications.
These architectures must be able to take advantage of the networks' fundamental capabilities, including existing local area network (LAN) and wireless LAN (WLAN) infrastructures, together with relevant operating and data storage systems.
Professional cloud integrators are now able to provide integration platforms and tools backed by strong partner alliances to achieve these goals.
Finally, unified management should be entrenched with 'multi-vendor-friendly' solutions capable of maximising the potential of virtualisation as well as mobile and cloud-based applications.
They should be able to integrate the network fabric spanning from the data centre to the network edge, including wired, wireless, mobile and cloud infrastructures.
Described as a 'single pane of glass' management strategy, this will enable users to automate provisioning for users, devices and applications, reducing the time it takes to deploy and support new systems and new-generation learning tools.
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