Enterprises continue to be enthusiastic about cloud computing services and report high levels of satisfaction with the effectiveness of their cloud investments in enabling flexibility and improved scalability but network performance issue remain a concern, according to a newly published Cloud Computing Infrastructure Study, which was commissioned by NTT Communications and conducted by IDG Research Services.
Among the most critical network performance issues around cloud adoption, the study found capacity limitations, possible downtime when changing network configurations and lead-time to change network configurations topped the list, with more than 70% of IT decision makers citing these as areas of concern.
Some key findings of the study:
- Forty percent (40%) of respondents worldwide report a high level of familiarity with virtualized network services.
- Most respondents (91%) are interested in learning more after seeing a description of virtualized network services (53% extremely or very interested and 38% somewhat interested).
- Common drivers for using cloud services – performance, reliability, cost efficiency, flexibility – remain high on IT decision makers’ list of deliverables by a cloud service embedded with a virtualized network.
- Relatively lower expectations for network-related deliverables – such as better bandwidth utilization and simplified network management – indicate IT decision makers are still thinking about virtualization primarily as a technology for servers, not networks.
- Simplified network management is largely unrecognized as a cloud benefit, suggesting relatively low maturity of the technology.
NTT Communications is already offering OpenFlow-based virtualized network services. The company said virtualized networks enable enterprises to expand network bandwidth on demand, allowing them to pay for only what they need at any given moment. Changes to capacity and routing over virtual networks are made via software command, negating the need for physical changes at the location of the routers.
- In June 2012, NTT Communications launched a globally seamless enterprise cloud service using OpenFlow network virtualization technology within and between data centers. The service, which launches June 20, is initially provided via NTT Com data centers in Japan and Hong Kong, followed by data centers in the United States (two locations), the United Kingdom and Singapore in December and in Australia, Malaysia and Thailand in March 2013.
NTT Com’s new infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering, Enterprise Cloud, provides global cloud resources that enterprise customers can easily control and manage to optimize their ICT costs and support the global expansion of corporate operations.
NTT Com said its new service will provide greater flexibility allowing system changes to be performed automatically using virtualized servers and networks, and a convenient customer portal. Primary features of the new Enterprise Cloud service include free-of-charge broadband connection from this service directly to the Arcstar Universal One cloud-based enterprise network in NTT Com data centers. On-demand backup is also provided via other data centers worldwide using NTT Com’s global and secure broadband virtualized networks. In addition, NTT Com will enable customers to perform precise, small-increment control of server resources, such as CPU, memory and disk, and network resources, such as virtual firewall, virtual load balancer and virtualized networks. ICT costs can be trimmed on a pay-as-you-go basis down to the per-minute level.