Downloads |
Evolving Market and Cloud Requirements
To meet the increasingly complex application and service requirements in today's challenging IT environment, enterprises and small businesses alike are turning to cloud-based computing. The new delivery model promises to improve the agility, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness for how IT services are consumed by businesses and delivered by service providers.
According to Forrester Research, the worldwide market for managed data center services will grow to US$117 billion worldwide by 2014. Within managed data center services, computing services (software as a service [SaaS] and infrastructure as a service [IaaS]) are expected to undergo a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) exceeding 15 percent from 2009 to 2014, content and application acceleration and optimization will reach US$12 billion at 15 percent CAGR over the same period.1
Enhancing the End-User Experience
Businesses and their service providers face new challenges as they seek to deliver applications from the cloud across distributed branches, remote sites, and mobile staff. To enhance the end-user experience and reap the benefits of cloud computing, businesses need end-to-end visibility into applications, as well as the ability to manage application performance. Cisco® Application Performance Management (APM) technologies enable service providers and their customers to take advantage of the embedded intelligence and power of the network, providing the visibility, optimization, control, and security necessary to unlock the full potential of cloud computing.
To optimize the end-user experience, service providers must offer application-aware services that provide performance assurance across all accessible points on the network. In addition to enabling cloud services assurance, this approach transforms the service provider's network into an application-fluent infrastructure (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Application Performance Management is the Foundation to Building Enhanced Cloud Portfolio
Cisco APM: Enabling Adoption of Cloud Services
The Cisco APM service for cloud assurance takes an architectural approach to virtualized data center monitoring for IaaS. The service offers the benefits of Cisco's Tier-1 partner-based approach by partnering with best-in-class APM service providers.
Cisco APM enables service providers to extend visibility to virtual Ethernet connections and virtual machines running on physical servers. This enhanced visibility enables fast, effective service provisioning; optimized orchestration of application, network, IT, and storage resources; and enhanced security over the WAN. APM includes Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), an innovative solution for accelerating and optimizing private and public cloud-based application delivery, including SaaS application delivery, while improving application availability and security. Cisco APM also supports application control through advanced, transaction-based quality of service (QoS) and dynamic bandwidth allocation. These capabilities empower service providers to offer the performance and features that their customers value most, such as end-to-end service-level agreements (SLAs) for enterprise network-based applications (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. SPs Can Differentiate the Cloud Proposition by Provisioning NW and IT Elements On-Demand
With Cisco APM, service providers have a cost-effective means to deliver a range of high-value services, including the following.
Boosting Performance of Collaboration Applications
For hosted Microsoft SharePoint architectures, Cisco WAAS, together with real-time performance monitoring by Cisco APM, can provide WAN data compression exceeding 80 percent, with application response time improving by a factor of three. By reducing the need for a WAN upgrade, Cisco APM can reduce total cost of ownership and help enterprises enhance collaboration and productivity.
Scaling and Securing Public Cloud SaaS Applications
By providing end-to-end visibility, Cisco APM enables providers to optimize performance and control of SaaS applications such as Cisco WebEx™ traffic to the cloud. In addition Cisco WAAS removes redundancy in connection streams, reducing WAN bandwidth consumption by up to 80 percent. To safeguard sensitive business data, Cisco WAAS also maintains Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security while optimizing SaaS data flows.
Accelerating Applications from the Private Cloud
Although private clouds let IT departments consolidate and virtualize distributed resources to scale their infrastructure, WAN latency can hamper performance for branch-office users. Cisco APM offers the visibility and WAN optimization that TCP applications require to help organizations save costs, scale services better, and boost employee productivity.
Optimizing Disaster Recovery
As enterprises move servers and data centers to private cloud architectures, maintaining high business continuity and disaster recovery plans is critical. Cisco APM provides the end-to-end application performance monitoring and measurement to identify and mitigate issues before they affect the business. Using data compression, Cisco WAAS can help optimize data replication to further minimize the effects of network outages.
Securing Data Delivered from the Cloud
As enterprises deliver services and applications from the cloud across WAN links not directly under their control, end-to-end security is more critical than ever. For cloud providers, HTTPS is becoming the transport protocol of choice, given the industrywide adoption of the SSL standard for web applications. Cisco WAAS can extend SSL protection to the branch office, while optimizing performance of SaaS and other cloud-based applications.
For More Information
1Forrester Research: Cisco Custom Managed Services Research, February 2010. It may be better having a footnote here and the actual reference at the end of the document.