Survey Finds that Cloud Computing Tests Bandwidth
March 14, 2012
With increasing acceptance of cloud computing by enterprise users comes increasing bandwidth needs, says a survey by Network Instruments (News – Alert), a provider of information and network management.
“While IT teams embrace cloud services and video conferencing as a way to increase cost savings and business flexibility, these technologies introduce new components and environments which make ensuring positive end-user experience all the more challenging,” Brad Reinboldt, senior product manager of Network Instruments said. “The reported lack of monitoring tools, quality metrics, and visibility create serious obstacles that prevent IT from effectively managing performance and jeopardize costly technology investments.”…
Network Instruments gave the survey to 163 network technicians from all over the world via a secure Web portal, which featured a series of questions on benefits of cloud computing, video conferencing, and application performance management.
The use of cloud computing services in business is growing steadily, with 60 percent of organizations using some form of cloud computing. Most of them were running Software as a Service (SaaS (News 
– Alert)) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) deployments. About 10 percent of respondents ran private clouds. Respondents said they believed that one third of all their software would run in the cloud in the next year.
Video conferencing has also apparently gone mainstream, with 70 percent of the respondents saying they planned to implement video conferencing within a year, with 55 percent having already installed a video conferencing solution. These solutions included desktop videoconferencing, conference rooms and telepresence.
Even though it has been widely adopted, video implementation has been hampered by inadequate user knowledge and training, as well as bandwidth concerns. Network professionals also said they lacked the tools to measure video quality objectively. Nearly one quarter of participants said they expected video to take up over half of their bandwidth by 2013.
The biggest concern that respondents had over using the cloud was data security, with 74 percent of people responding saying they were worried about the safety of their data. The other big issue was assessing the quality of end-user experiences.
Network professionals are also concerned with how well their networks are actually performing. The biggest challenge, with 83 percent of survey respondents answering, was finding out where the problem was while they were troubleshooting. They also said that with the expected increase in cloud services, their bandwidth needs would grow by 25 to 50 percent over the next two years.