"I probably wouldn't put anything mission-critical in the Cloud now." That's
a recent quote from the CIO of a major consumer brand talking about his
enterprise IT infrastructure. The CIO of a consumer e-commerce Web site would
be equally nervous about moving its front- or back-end resources to the
Cloud.
As tempting as its cost savings and scalability may be, the risks of the
Cloud are now also coming to light. Availability and security concerns have
dominated this discussion, but the performance of the Cloud - the response
time or speed at which services are delivered to an end user - may, in
practical terms, be one of the most important risks to your business.
In this article we'll describe the performance risk inherent in the Cloud.
We'll explain how this applies to the various Cloud services, offer data and
analysis that may surprise you, and suggest a series of... (more)