Many enterprises are trying to increase productivity, operate more efficiently and reduce costs by re-locating their applications and services to the cloud.

However, placing their applications and services in the cloud is not enough to achieve these objectives. Enterprises also need network connectivity that gives employees at every location flexible, reliable and secure access to those cloud-based applications and services.

Although the Internet generally is adequate for consumer applications, IT executives do not want to rely on it to support their multinational business operations.

As a best-effort network, the Internet cannot guarantee data delivery, quality of service or service priorities. Variable traffic loads have a direct impact on the Internet's performance and therefore on the performance of enterprise applications and services as well.

As traffic loads increase, so do performance-affecting issues such as latency, packet loss and congestion at peering points between networks. With no strong service-level agreements (SLAs) available for the Internet, neither enterprise users, nor cloud-service providers have any control over the Internet's performance. Consequently, they do not have an effective, reliable communications network.

As more and more consumers adopt cloud-based services, especially for streaming-media applications, the Internet's performance problem only will get worse. As the cloud scales to support these applications, the Internet's performance issues scale right along with it.