The Network is the Problem: Barriers to cloud adoption

Reg Research How can cloud computing be a sensible option when it makes you so dependent on the network, and often even the public internet? If the comms slow down, the user experience takes a dive. Lose the link completely, and you’re stuffed.

We have been hearing such questions and objections from nay-sayers ever since commercial hosted application services have been available. How legitimate are the concerns?

After all, many of us today rely on wide area comms and the internet for remote access and mobile computing, and that seems to work OK.

So what’s the difference? Well the latest survey of Reg readers conducted by Freeform Dynamics suggests that there really is a difference.

The needs and expectations of remote users have largely evolved around dodgy low-speed connections, and application architectures are often designed to handle intermittent periods of offline working.

An office worker relying on a pure browser-based interface to a hosted SaaS application is quite a different matter – the comms in that context become genuinely critical.

If you want to read more about this, and also see what fellow eaders think of the performance and reliability of different types of network services and service providers, then download the report put together by Freeform’s charts-meister Andrew Buss.

Click here to get your copy, it's free.