Utilizing the cloud can be very beneficial to businesses, and that tends to get companies excited. Why shouldn’t they be? The cloud can help save money in technology while drastically boosting productivity. But in the hurry to get everything in the cloud, companies can forget some fundamentals in IT that could bring the entire cloud migration to a slow and aggravating halt. This post will highlight ways to optimize your network and application performance in the cloud.
Maintain a Strong Infrastructure
Once masses of data servers and more are stored in the cloud, life for businesses can be more efficient—if all the basics are covered. When a company turns to cloud services they are putting more pressure on their networks, and a strong infrastructure must be maintained for this to go smoothly.
WAN and broadband are the top contenders when it comes to optimizing your IT for cloud migration. The WAN is important because it is your wide area network. Whether connected through a telephone system or satellites, it is what your computers and all other technology will connect to, and sometimes network traffic gets clogged up. Broadband networks can offer massive amounts of bandwidth for a fraction of the price but are limited in size and dependability.
Cut Out the Fat in WAN
With your WAN and broadband network being such an important part in how all your IT components function and talk to each other, there are some important maintenance tasks that must be implemented (Source: Network Computing):
• Compression – Compacting and/or shaving off unnecessary parts of packages you send to and from the cloud makes compression a vital tool to have. There are programs that incorporate algorithms for removing unnecessary files or minimizing their content, which help with reducing network bottleneck.
• De-Duplication – Backups are also important, but they cause lags in performance and clog up the network intersections. Setting up de-duplication will remove all network traffic that comes with backups by only completing one backup of a file. Moving forward, only the updated parts are being backed up over time, vs the entire file.
Redirect Traffic
Here are some additional ways to optimize your network for the cloud in terms of traffic:
• Caching – Imagine coming home from a long day at work and not having to take out a bunch of food to cook dinner. Because you already prepared dinner the night before, you can go into the fridge and find a clean plate of food cooked and ready to go. That is kind of how caching works. Caching utilizes locally stored and pre-populated data such as web page images and other elements that are frequently called into use by your browser. This helps with network traffic because instead of having to constantly re-populate images onto a page through the network, this info will be pre-populated and ready to go.
• WAN Traffic Management –WAN traffic management will enable companies to save their network resources and enforce techniques that will identify and prioritize traffic by utilizing traffic shaping and monitoring.
• Broadband Bonding – Another way to optimize your IT for the cloud would be to implement broadband bonding. This consists of bundling up several broadband and internet connections to a unified connection that provides room for growth and fault tolerance to boot.
Using the above suggestions will greatly improve network and application performance when you are migrating your business to the cloud. Of course, these are not the only factors to consider when undergoing this process. If you are thinking about moving some systems to the cloud, evaluate your IT needs and dig into additional cloud migration strategies today.
