On onramp to the Cloud

It is clear that organizations wish to use Cloud Computing. The reasons include saving money, deploying new services quickly, and, of course, the desire to take advantage of the latest technology trend.

What is less clear is how an organization can connect their internal systems up to a Cloud-based infrastructure in a secure, managed, manner. If an organization connects their internal applications up to Cloud-based services, there is the danger that private information leaves their network and travels up to the service-provider. Additionally, any network outages between the internal application and the Cloud results in latency for the user, and potential lost data.

Therefore, there is a place for application gateways to act as "onramps" from the local network up to the Cloud. They can data sent up to the cloud for private information which should not be leaving the local network. And, by caching data and by hosting local functionality, they also mitigate against network outages which can negate the value of using the Cloud within an application infrastructure.