Going into a cloud deployment, what kinds of questions should solution providers offering networking services ask the customer?

When adopting a cloud strategy, many conversations and questions will come into play, Tidwell said.  First, the cloud application needs to be defined, as well as where it's going to reside and how access to that app is going to be delivered.

"Those are just the basic infrastructure questions of how, why, and where. Once you get past those, you start digging deeper into specifics, like how much bandwidth will the app consume, and how can we gear an algorithm such that we accommodate concurrent sessions. Then, we have to scale it all,  especially if you go into larger deployment with tools like Salesforce, large apps with multiple database accesses that are hosted in the cloud," he said.