Clouding the Company: What You Need to Know if You Plan to Move to the Cloud In 2012

I recently participated in an ADC challenge hosted by Network World, in which we discussed the concept of migrating applications into the cloud and what it did for Radware as an application delivery controller (ADC) vendor.

We started by setting the background to what it meant to migrate an application to the cloud. We all agreed that migrating an application to the cloud means either moving all of its tiers to the cloud (web, application, etc.) or only the web tier.

The next step was to discuss how the application migration relates to the application delivery space. Here the discussion revolved around the need to provide migrated applications and adequate application delivery services at least at the level it received when it was hosted in the original data center.

And this is exactly what I wanted to touch on in this post – IT managers should consider that when they migrate applications to a cloud, they are still its owner, even though the application is no longer hosted in their data center. If the application fails, they still will probably get the phone call.

So an IT manager must do all he can to ensure the application’s reliability, and this includes providing an ADC in front of it to ensure application availability, performance, scalability and security.

The best option would be to ask the cloud vendor if it offers any cloud based ADC services, and, if so, make sure these cloud ADC services offer the same capabilities as the ADC in the local data center. For example, if you enabled advanced application delivery services such as SSL offloading or caching on the ADC in the local data center, ask your cloud vendor if its ADC services support these features as well.

To summarize, don’t compromise on the level of service you provide your applications, even if they are hosted in the cloud, which offers all the infrastructure services.

Regards,

Eitan Bremler