Delivery Cloud computing seems to continue to be amongst the most talked about trends in IT. More and more customers are consuming and offering services via Saas, PaaS, & IaaS. And with the options ever expanding, it is quite interesting to see how all these transitions impact the current backend infrastructure of end user organizations. The fact of the matter is; cloud offerings can present huge challenges on underlying IT infrastructure, which in turn is tries to maintain consistent performance and manageability right across. This is because IT has little control over the best-effort Internet connections. A poor Internet connection between the user and the cloud service means sluggish application delivery that puts a damper on user productivity.

As cloud computing finds acceptance across the board, what would emerge eventually would the right mix of public and private cloud based solutions, i.e. hybrid model. When implemented properly, this enables the deployment of applications in an active/active model across cloud boundaries and data in the right place at the right time, regardless of the point of ingress of client requests. This is often harder to achieve than it might sound, primarily because of the way that many existing applications have been architected along with core networking and database limitations.

One of the core goals hence, is to support the ongoing move to hybrid cloud architectures. For many existing packaged and custom applications, moving them in whole or part to a public cloud infrastructure can be a complex process. Because legacy applications may not have been built with cloud principles in mind, they often require the services that can only be delivered by high quality Application Delivery Controllers. Fortunately, the technology that has worked for optimizing private WAN also works well for public cloud environments. This should come as welcome news to companies, which are adopting hybrid architecture.

ADC plays a key role in driving application lifecycle in hybrid cloud environments. You can build your application blueprint for application evaluation and testing in the public cloud; then move to enterprise deployment in the private cloud data center; allow bursting and data recovery in the public cloud.

ADC helps to bridge the gap for what’s needed in the cloud for application delivery and security, regardless of the cloud model you choose to use.