Friday, May 3, 2013

Cloud computing is great, unless your have an issue with your Internet



So while at work this week we ran into a location that was having issues connecting to our cloud. After troubleshooting the issue we found that the internet provider was having issues. A technician was dispatched and then it was escalated to have other technicians work on the issue as it was affecting several places in the area. This went on for most of the week and finally got resolved today, after business closed at 5pm.
This got me thinking, cloud computing is really taking off and has a lot of benefits for companies who are taking their IT processes into the cloud. The problem is if you have a provider that has a lot of issues, it can make a very poor experience in the cloud. Your users if faced with this will complain louder than a failing ibm hard drive grinding its way into defectiveness. Some areas this can be a big issue if you don't have a lot of choice with providers. Some areas there are only one or two providers, this seems to still be an issue in areas that are more on the remote side of things.
Even if your data center has the top of the line hardware and a huge pipe coming in, the data has to go through the pipes and get to your location. If thats in a area that has only DSL connections to use, your cloud will be stormy! The cloud uses a lot of upload speed, and you need to calculate how much bandwidth per person you need. Your cloud provider can help you figure this out,
for example, our cloud provider gave us a number of 256KB of bandwidth per person. So if you have 4 users, you need at least a full 1MB of upload speed. DSL does not even go that high, and then if your cloud host is on one side of the country, and your location that needs the cloud is on the other side of the country, that will make for a difficult time.

Does your business use the cloud? Do you have a location that does not run well in the cloud? Talk back to me and let me know.
My next instalment will talk about what to do if you are at a location that cant get good internet for your cloud.

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