All aboard the cloud

As more consumers take to the cloud with mobile devices and unified communications, the demands on the networks delivering access to the enormous volumes of data stored in and applications delivered from 'the cloud' is also going to increase.

The ability of a provider to rapidly scale on-demand while maintaining performance levels is imperative to its success.

Lori MacVittie is technical marketing manager for Application Services at F5 Networks.

The ability of a provider to rapidly scale on-demand while maintaining performance levels is imperative to its success and the success of its application and device partners.

There are two benefits of 'cloud' (as nebulous as that definition might be) being put forward to the consumer market:

(1) Never losing data, because it's backed up in the cloud, and
(2) A seamless transition between desktop, laptop, and mobile devices.

It is the latter that will fuel service provider needs to manage growth and scale, because a 'seamless' transition to the consumer market means 'looks, feels, and performs the same' regardless of the access medium.

Whereas providers historically needed to analyse text and phone calling patterns as a means to perform capacity planning, now they will also need to track usage and access patterns for applications, and include those in their already complex formulas necessary to compute when and how to efficiently scale to meet demand.

It should come as no surprise that this means service providers will need to employ cloud computing techniques for on-demand scalability of their own services to meet the demands of customers attempting to access cloud-deployed application services.

The demands on service provider networks and infrastructure will likely be somewhat predictable based on consumer usage, but when combined with enterprise customer usage demands, it's difficult to determine how much infrastructure spending is required.

Consumers' use during the 'work day' is relatively light. The reverse is true for enterprise customers for whom usage patterns are heavier during the day and lighter in the evening.

Except, of course, when they're the same...

The growing use of mobile access technologies by younger and younger (was that a six-year-old texting from her booster seat?) consumers and the increasing use of personal technology to access corporate resources - and vice-versa - is blurring the lines between what service providers might have once designated as 'corporate' versus 'consumer' usage.

To maintain scalability and service level agreements across both markets, it will be necessary to leverage contextual networking and application delivery solutions within the service provider network. The ability to contextually identify users and usage to ensure resources are provisioned appropriately across the service provider's entire network will be paramount to successfully navigating the explosive growth brought about by the combined forces of mobile devices and cloud computing services.

It will no longer be enough to identify application traffic based on application or destination or even source. The growing conflation of work-life across devices and users means that a service provider will need to leverage every tool at their command to address performance and availability challenges that are sure to come.

Cloud computing models themselves offer service providers the flexibility and adaptable provisioning of resources necessary to meet volatile demand for both their services and external cloud-deployed application services. With a model that can automatically provision resources where they are necessary on-demand, the service provider can concern itself with employing the contextually aware services of network and application delivery network infrastructure that will be required to keep performance, security, and availability levels while remaining competitively priced.

Indeed, savvy service providers will note the conflation of business and consumer user and correctly identify a potentially new market strategy that employs cloud computing as the basis for a unified work-life access strategy.

Leveraging context and intelligent infrastructure as the foundation for a cloud computing-based model allows the service provider the means by which infrastructure services can be applied appropriately to customer traffic dynamically. This allows providers to simultaneously support business and consumer access using the same resources. Doing so reduces the complexity of the already complex architectures needed to support existing traffic, while seamlessly scaling for growth and making efficient use of resources by dynamically provisioning where and when such resources become necessary.

Service provider networks have always been challenging and demanding of environments. They require high-performance, high-capacity, flexible infrastructure and delivery solutions and these demands are growing along with explosive consumer use.

The push to drive consumers to 'cloud' does not alleviate the burden on service providers. It increases the burden - not only to connect mobile consumers and business users with their 'clouds', but to ensure the message of 'seamless, fast and secure' user experiences put forth by cloud and mobile manufacturers alike are able to come to fruition.