How many applications do you use that exist only on the computer in front of you? Two? One? None at all? I occasionally use two applications that live locally on my computer, but all the rest, including every application I use for personal and professional work, are delivered over the internet. That’s pretty much where we are these days, isn’t it?

In today’s digital landscape, application demands such as scalability, performance, and reliability push many IT organizations toward cloud-based networks. Initially, cloud providers’ main offering was managed, virtualized data storage and services, or cloud computing. As cloud ecosystems have matured, so have the tools, services, and use cases available to their customers.

Peering is great for quality and cost savings, but how do you ensure your network is up to the task? Capacity planning is a classic task that should be very familiar to network operators. Providing the right capacity at the right time is crucial to finding a balance between cost and quality in your network.

To fully capitalize on the promises of digital transformation, IT leaders have come to recognize that a mix of cloud and data center infrastructure provides several business advantages, including increased agility, cost efficiencies, global availability, and, ultimately, better customer experiences.

I used the first two parts of this series to lay out my case for how and why cloud-based networks can effectively “Trojan horse” costs into your networking spend and highlighted some real-world instances I’ve come across in my career. In the third and final installment of this series, I want to focus on ways you can optimize your personnel and cloud infrastructures to prevent or offset some of these novel costs.

When transitioning from physical infrastructure to the cloud, it’s easy to think that your networks will instantly be faster, more reliable, and produce windfalls of cost savings overnight. Unfortunately, this wishful line of thinking fails to account for some of the complexities of cloud networking and is one of the biggest drivers of the cloud deployment mistakes we see.

In the evening on September 30, people across Cuba found their internet service cut. The residents of this Caribbean nation had begun protesting their government’s tepid response to Hurricane Ian which had wrought destruction a week earlier. Internet service returned to normal the following morning, but this outage wasn’t caused by storm-related damage. This blackout was a deliberate act, a fact confirmed when service dropped out for the same period of time the following day.

For organizations of all types and sizes, networks are more than just a line item on a departmental budget. Modern digital enterprises understand that long-term competitiveness depends on maximizing their IT assets to create exceptional user experiences.

Part two of a three-part guide to assuring performance and availability of critical cloud services across public and hybrid clouds and the internet Monitoring your user traffic is critical for knowing the quality of the digital experience you are delivering, but what about the performance of new cloud or container deployments, expected new users in a new region, or new web pages or applications that don’t have established traffic? This is where synthetic testing can be invaluable.

The final post of a three-part guide to assuring performance and availability of critical cloud services across public and hybrid clouds and the internet Kentik Synthetics adds integrated, autonomous, pervasive performance test telemetry to our market-leading network traffic analytics and observability platform, the Kentik Network Observability Platform. For modern clouds, proactive synthetic monitoring can no longer be delivered as a standalone tool.