Evaluating the Impact of Hybrid Cloud on Supporting Changing Network Requirements

Once you start moving your data into the cloud, you may need to address latency concerns, depending on the amount of data you’re storing there and how often you need to access it. In a hybrid model, you’re not just utilizing your LAN or WAN for data access, you’re now going across the Internet to access it. So, you really need to think about the kind of data you’re willing to store in the cloud based on how often you need to get to it and the network speed that you’re dealing with. Although storage may be unlimited (for a price) in the cloud, the network is not. Two issues you need to consider are amount of data and network speed.

Amount of data

Say that you want to store a large amount of tier 3 data in a storage cloud provider. It may not make sense to actually try to transport the data over the Internet. Remember, the bandwidth of a truck is greater than any existing network. It might make sense to provide the data to the vendor in another way. Calculate transfer rates based on the amount of data you have and then decide which leads to the next point regarding network speed.

Network speeds

Bandwidth is just one element that contributes to network speed. Latency is another one. Latency refers to a delay in processing data as it moves from one part of a network to another. For example, when a singer’s mouth moves on a video but the words don’t seem to match, that’s because of latency. Low latency is when there’s a short delay; high latency is when there’s a longer delay. So, although the speed of your network should be fixed according to the bandwidth of the network connection, it doesn’t always work that way because of latencies. A number of factors contribute to network latency, including data collisions, contention for bandwidth, encryption, as well as routers and computer hardware delays, to name a few.

A good corporate LAN/WAN is a gigabit network, which means that your internal network might be faster than the Internet. So, after your information gets to the Internet, you may experience a bottleneck as the information moves to your provider. This bottleneck will affect how quickly you can get your data off your premises and, more importantly, back to your premises. If you have a petabyte of data in a provider’s cloud and want to analyze it on-premises, be aware that it’s going to take a while to get the data back. You need to consider this issue when planning your hybrid deployment. For instance, you may decide not to store tier 1 data in the cloud because network speeds may not match your requirements for use.