Alan Hannan is a member of the Netskope Network Visionaries advisory group.
The cloud often seems like a black box for many corporate networking and security professionals. They have expertise in optimizing their internal network. Still, once they offload their traffic to the cloud, they figure they’re handing off optimization to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider. But a company that chooses a business-critical cloud solution without considering the underlying architecture is setting itself up for potential disappointment down the road. Or even worse, opening themselves up to the risk of greater exposure to threats, lost or compromised data, or degraded employee productivity.
Offering an excellent customer experience in the cloud requires a multi-faceted and complex balancing act. SaaS providers must optimize many parameters, often weighing cost against various approaches to redundancy, scalability against resiliency, and security against performance. These are not simple equations where a change in one area has entirely predictable ramifications in the other. Vendors are constantly making decisions around tradeoffs to maximize customer satisfact