Cloud-based IT services

Insightful analysis by consultants Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler, plus links to the latest WAN news headlines

It is easy to suggest that one of the leaders of the first wave of public cloud computing was salesforce.com. A few years ago, the Salesforce CRM solution was one of a small number of enterprise applications that companies were just beginning to acquire from a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider. 

There is no doubt that IT organizations are increasingly using a SaaS provider to gain access to a growing set of enterprise applications and that the use of these SaaS-based applications will continue to place demands on the organization's WAN. However, as will be discussed in this newsletter, there is also no doubt that increasingly IT organizations are beginning to acquire a new set of applications from SaaS providers and that this set of applications is targeted not at a company's business managers, but directly at IT organizations.

The factors that drive companies to use SaaS-based enterprise applications were documented in a report entitled Cloud Computing: A Reality Check & Guide to Risk Mitigation. The primary factors, in descending order of importance, are that SaaS-based solutions lower cost, reduce the amount of time that it takes to deploy new functionality, enable organizations to obtain functionality that the organization is not able to provide itself and frees up resources.

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It is easy to suggest that one of the leaders of the first wave of public cloud computing was salesforce.com. A few years ago, the Salesforce CRM solution was one of a small number of enterprise applications that companies were just beginning to acquire from a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider. 

There is no doubt that IT organizations are increasingly using a SaaS provider to gain access to a growing set of enterprise applications and that the use of these SaaS-based applications will continue to place demands on the organization's WAN. However, as will be discussed in this newsletter, there is also no doubt that increasingly IT organizations are beginning to acquire a new set of applications from SaaS providers and that this set of applications is targeted not at a company's business managers, but directly at IT organizations.

The factors that drive companies to use SaaS-based enterprise applications were documented in a report entitled Cloud Computing: A Reality Check & Guide to Risk Mitigation. The primary factors, in descending order of importance, are that SaaS-based solutions lower cost, reduce the amount of time that it takes to deploy new functionality, enable organizations to obtain functionality that the organization is not able to provide itself and frees up resources.

As noted, IT organizations are beginning to acquire a new set of applications from SaaS providers. This new set of applications is traditional IT services and applications and includes network and application performance management, network and application optimization, unified communications, VoIP, virtual desktops, security and disaster recovery. One interesting irony of this situation is that a growing number of IT organizations that are struggling to respond to the WAN challenges that result from the increasing use of SaaS-based enterprise applications are finding that they can best respond to those challenges by using SaaS-based management and optimization solutions.

In our next newsletter we will begin a discussion of managing cloud-based solutions. More information on this topic can be found here.

In the mean time, we would also like to hear from you. What use is your organization making of cloud based IT services?

Read more about lans & wans in Network World's LANs & WANs section.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.