A great deal of attention is focused on the quality of service and risk aspects of cloud computing. But with hosted offerings still only accounting for a relatively small part of IT delivery, a bigger concern for most organisations should be the way in which application performance, availability and security challenges are quietly creeping up in the context of internal systems, sometimes without anyone even noticing.

Key Points

• The pressure is growing on the corporate network and the systems it supports
• Difficulties keeping up are negatively impacting the business
• Many problems stem from shortcomings in the access infrastructure
• Moving forward successfully has a philosophical as well as a practical dimension
• A concerted effort must be made to break the ‘reactive investment’ habit