In the last newsletter and in our ongoing discussion, we began a discussion of the net neutrality ruling and the impact on the enterprise. And while we feel that we’re far from a final call on the exact rules that we’ll be playing by in this respect, there are certain areas that could be significantly impacted by the rulings.
Let’s start with a simple and well-established area – Internet-based VPNs where the enterprise chooses to use the Internet as a communications backbone. At this point, this methodology provides a reasonable balance of cost, security and performance. However, the current ruling, that – at least as we understand it – permits an ISP to differentiate/discriminate (a fine line between the two) on delivery of various types of traffic could have a significant impact.
For instance, assume that the ISP deems it appropriate to block/slow peer-to-peer traffic. This might not be a bad idea for limiting illegal sharing of copyrighted materials. But what if the enterprise use peer-to-peer traffic for a given internal application?
And there are potentially vast implications for the burgeoning cloud computing market. What happens when my cloud computing service provider (CCSP) and an ISP decide not to play nicely in the sandbox? This brings up the simple question: Is it a good idea or a bad idea for your primary ISP and your primary CCSP to be the same service provider?
On the plus side, so long as the same service provider provides both the access and the cloud service, it’s reasonable to argue the services should be more reliable, performance should be easier to monitor, and there should be less finger-pointing.
As our research shows, managing the performance of applications acquired from a software-as-a-service provider is very important to IT organizations. That being said, today that task is very difficult as it involves getting detailed management data from at least three management domains; such as the enterprise IT organization, multiple network service providers and one cloud computing service provider. Within a given organizational domain (for example, the enterprise IT organization), management data must be gathered on multiple technology domains; for example, networks, servers, security devices. However, just being able to gather this data is not sufficient. The data needs to also be effectively processed to provide the information necessary to perform tasks such as identifying the root cause of poor application performance. Identifying the root cause of poor application performance in a public cloud computing solution is an order of magnitude more difficult than it is in the traditional IT environment.
Because of the added difficulty, there’s a good case for having the network service provider be the cloud computing service provider.
At the same time, there’s always a question about best-in-class services. It’s at least possible, and, in fact probable, that there will be cases where a “best” service is offered by a CCSP who is not affiliated with – and may be a competitor with – your preferred transport services provider.
Our best advice on this is to follow the issue very closely and make sure that you’re asking appropriate questions of both your ISP and your CCSP. Also, this will very probably be a major issue that needs to be addressed in your service-level agreements.
