Bandwidth: The New Frontier of Cloud Computing

Cloud ComputingSoftware, platforms, infrastructure, and storage are all being relegated to cloud services as hybrid takes over. Here’s how networking is becoming a service commodity along with them.

Whether you store data in the public cloud and action it locally, or send workloads to other environments from your own on-premises or legacy systems, there’s one potential weak link in cloud computing of any kind: Transport.

Moving data to where it needs to be is both a technical and a financial problem that you have to take into account when you’re weighing up any cloud deployment. After all, you have to provision for the maximum you’ll need, and you’ll still be paying for it even if you’re not using it all the time.

If only there was a way of paying for just the data networking you use on an as-needed basis, driven by application requirements rather than provisioned in large blocks or channels that are destined to sit idle when a workload inevitably slows down or changes.

Enter one of the final frontiers in cloud computing: Networking as a service (NaaS). Simply put, it’s the practice of buying network capacity on an incremental basis, just like you do for storage, compute, and platforms in every other aspect of the cloud.

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