Wonders of cloud computing and technologies are a buzz these days and provide users access to unlimited storage, applications, and services. However, there is a bottleneck that affects your experience with any cloud infrastructure: the network. Many enterprises decide to shift to the cloud without giving it much thought and the limitations that the network can place on its performance.

Previously, you could throw in some bandwidth, and the network problems would stay behind. It relates perfectly in the case of hybrid and public cloud deployment. But there is a new approach to network optimization that can focus entirely on the application. We will look into ways that can modify the network and optimize cloud application.

The easiest and most popular approach is to alleviate network traffic to public and hybrid clouds to strengthen the internet. WAN optimization can be done through compression, local content caching, and TCP window manipulation are the go-to techniques to speed up the access.

On the other hand, using SD-WAN has proven to be a better option. An SD-WAN offers smart routing techniques by using two or more paths to access the cloud. The path is selected based on several variables, including bandwidth, latency, and packet loss. The technology is beneficial when it comes to connecting remote locations to the cloud.

In case remote users want to utilize the cloud services from their home offices, or road, or any other place outside of the office, a different approach has to be considered. Before cloud computing became a thing, apps and data were kept in a private data center or colocation. If remote users wanted to access any data, they would need VPN technology to connect to the main corporate office.

With the data spread across various cloud platforms, it makes no sense to terminate a user’s VPN tunnel at the corporate headquarter, only to have them back across the internet or expensive WAN links. Instead, engineers should define a data path with minimum network hops. This means that streamlined and secured access to the public Cloud Hosting Solutions over the internet with the help of VPN, SSL VPN, or web-based access with HTTPS.

Additionally, if your end users are spread across the globe, developing a distributed architecture, which is latency-sensitive, seems like a viable option. Globally distributed cloud services can speed up the client-server access in the regions they are deployed. With this, users can access the servers located closest to them, geographically.

These days, network engineers are busy to understand the criticality of the applications performing end-to-end. Not only is it important to understand the data flow in the network, but also among the server and other distributed resources residing in different cloud areas or cloud platforms.

Having a clear understanding of how the data flows in the network with network performance management (NPM) tools can help architects optimize network distribution to avoid bottlenecks. It also helps in understanding the QoS (quality of service).

The ultimate goal should be a complete, optimized, software-driven network smart architecture. Unfortunately, it is easier said than done, which is why companies are focusing on specific areas like WAN or data center. But the goal should be a software-defined framework in the end.