Cloud services: Bring your own…license

Enterprise IT is starting to look a lot like the parsimonious neighbour’s BBQ. Bring a plate, bring your own drink, device*, app…and license.

That’s right, when you're buying stuff online, say like cloud services from Amazon, you can chuck in a license, say from your friendly neighbourhood WAN optimisation vendor.

While explaining to us that as you back up more data over the WAN or stuff it into the cloud, disk vendors will tell you more capacity is required, and telcos will insist it’s bandwidth you want to boost performance, while it’s actually WAN optimisation you need, Silver Peak APAC regional director Wayne Neich shared something which we found a lot more interesting.

“When procuring cloud services, you can bring your own license for third party software to improve the delivery of that service,” he says.

WAN optimisation is nothing new; back in the day, it involved chucking in an appliance – literally, a box - on each side of the link.

That’s obviously a bit of a mission, especially if the one side of the link is down here in New Zealand, and the other is somewhere in America or the far east or who-knows-where.

Like a lot of things in this industry, physical hardware is no longer necessarily required to deliver the same advantages for WAN optimisation.

The box is just a case for the software, effectively, so it can (and is) provided as a service by any one of a number of vendors.

But back to Neich. “When procuring services from the cloud, you can take your optimisation license, orchestrate its deployment at the source of your services [with the participation, one imagines, of a faceless techie on the other side of the cloud] and at the point of consumption and gain the benefit of improved delivery,” he confirms.

Apparently, it’s not even particularly difficult to pull that off, either.

*At the recent KickStart conference, Kaseya’s Dermot McCann implored us to stop writing about ‘BYOD’. In a touché moment, we implored vendors to stop talking about it.