Last month, I was approached by the BCS (British Computer Society) to get involved in a televised panel session to discuss the implications of adopting a Cloud Computing strategy (SEE ”DEBATE” LINK BELOW). We spend a lot of time advising organizations that they can’t ignore the importance of how applications perform over “non-LAN” networks and “The Cloud” is certainly one of these. So, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to raise the nature of the network in “Cloud” delivery as an issue that companies embarking on a Cloud Computing implementation need to really think about.

The debate quickly revealed that Cloud Computing really does mean different thing to different people. For some, it means Software as a Service (SaaS), where applications are hosted by the author (or hosting service on the author’s behalf). This is becoming really popular, particularly with smaller companies where the economies of scale possible for vendors like Google with Google Apps, Salesforce.com etc can make these applications hugely cost effective. Others extend the definition to include Platform as a Service (PaaS) – where you can build and host your application using the providers tools and infrastructure, like appforce.com. For some Cloud Computing is simply Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), or even hosting! And there are even more definitions where a vendor has simply noticed that there’s a lot of “buzz” around the term Cloud and so they must use it in their marketing.

Regardless of which definition you may wish to apply, the success or otherwise of implementing a Cloud Computing model, will rely heavily on the performance of the application running over the network the user is going to use to access the Cloud Computing-based solution. Where the application is going to be hosted relative to the end-user (same country, same continent, different continent) is going to have an impact on its performance. Things such as available bandwidth, latency and loss will all influence application performance. However this, as the DEBATE shows, is something that seems to be just one of a great number of items that need to be added to the Cloud Computing checklist. However, it really is one that I believe you simply can’t ignore – you may be able to control or determine the hosts and even specify minimum performance (cpu, memory etc) on the clients but the network, particularly when public is much harder to control and the application needs to perform reasonably even when the network is under stress.