Many of us now use the cloud on a regular basis, and we rarely give it a second thought. That is, until the cloud fails to respond in some way. For example, this article is being written using research gathered and stored in Microsoft OneNote — in the cloud. These notes were compiled on an office iMac as well as on an iPhone hundreds of miles away from the office. And there they are, just a click or tap away.
But what would happen if those notes took forever to load? For starters, you’d have a grumpy writer who’d quickly look for a better way to get the job done. While we can all appreciate resourcefulness, sluggish cloud performance can translate into lost sales, abandoned shopping carts, dissatisfied customers, poor productivity, poor employee morale, and unauthorized workarounds.
Several studies have shown that delays in page loading times, even as short as one second, can result in fewer page views, lost conversions, and dissatisfaction. Clearly, speed, or lack thereof, is an important factor in the user’s experience and, ultimately, the company’s bottom line.
An article on TechNet explains that “…’cloud acceleration’ refers to cloud-based techniques for improving the overall responsiveness of an application by reducing the time it takes to deliver content to an end user.”
In a use case on cloud acceleration, Aryaka explains that “As the location of applications and data continues to move off premises to cloud services, new acceleration services are needed to support a range of deployment models — public, private, or hybrid, and even the web domain. Since the access medium to all cloud services is primarily the Internet, application performance takes an obvious hit using current solutions.”
Though the nuts and bolts of cloud acceleration vary from one solutions provider to the next, the benefits of cloud acceleration include:
. Faster application performance
. A better user experience
These in turn solve the problems associated with poor performance. Instead of abandoning a shopping cart or not using a given application due to sluggish performance or long page load times, uses will continue interacting with the application as originally intended.
Works Cited:
- TechNet Magazine, “Cloud Computing: Cloud acceleration,”-https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn343778.aspx
- Aryaka, “Use Case: Cloud Acceleration,”-http://www.aryaka.com/use-cases/cloud-acceleration/
