The good news about cloud based applications is that in order to be successful, they must be fairly light weight in terms of their bandwidth footprint. Most cloud based designers keep create applications with a fairly small data footprint. A poorly designed cloud application that required large amounts of data transfer, would not get good reviews and would likely fizzle out.
The bad news is that cloud applications must share your Internet link with recreational traffic, and recreational traffic is often bandwidth intensive with no intention of playing nice when sharing a link .
For businesses, a legitimate concern is having their critical cloud based applications starved for bandwidth. When this happens they can perform poorly or lock up, creating a serious drop in productivity.
If you suspect you have bandwidth contention impacting the performance of a critical cloud application, the best place to start your investigation would be with a bandwidth controller/monitor that can show you the basic footprint of how much bandwidth an application is using.
Below is a quick screen shot that I often use from our NetEqualizer when trouble shooting a customer link. It gives me a nice snap shot of utilization. I can sort the heaviest users by their bandwidth footprint. I can can then click on a convenient, DNS look up tab, to see who they are.
In my next post I will detail some typical bandwidth planning metrics for going to the cloud . Stay tuned.
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