With two of the most common workloads that are moving to the cloud there are factors to consider to keep network costs low and achieve a good user experience.
eMail
It’s likely that a move to a cloud email solution will have a negligible effect on your network usage.
Switching from POP3 to Cloud eMail
If you are using POP3 email then you already send and receive all of your email via your internet connection; but it’s likely that each mail is only delivered to the one device you first read it or send it from.
One of the big benefits of cloud based email is the ability to synchronise mail between all of your devices and this will result in more traffic to your desktop, mobile phone and tablet if you want to keep everything in step.
The concern for a number of customers is mobile data costs, and there are several things you can do to keep mobile data usage in check.
How to keep mobile data costs of email to a minimum
1) Manually synchronise your mobile email rather than using PUSH email settings
2) Limit email size to a small number of kilobytes
3) Sync mail only for a few days
4) Select the folders to synchronise, don’t sync junk or deleted items
5) Use mailbox rules to filter email you don’t want on your mobile devices
6) Don’t download images embedded in email
7) Keep your mobile/tablet connected to your wifi network whenever possible
Exchange to Exchange Online
If you are using an on site exchange server and switch to exchange online, there is a slight difference in the way email gets routed and this can affect the usage of your network.
Where you have an on premise exchange server, it will send information to internal users over the local network, not requiring an internet connection or using bandwidth to deliver local mail. This changes with a cloud solution such that even local mail uses the internet connection to deliver to other internal users.
In most cases you won’t notice a difference in performance, and it's only the cost of additional network usage that you need to worry about. Only in unusual circumstances where you have a large volume of internal email or very large attachments will this be an issue. Normally, regardless of your current email arrangements, moving your email service to a cloud solution will have a negligible impact on your network usage and cost.
File management/cloud storage
File management and cloud storage is where you will notice a difference in the way an on site solution uses your network versus a cloud solution.
With an on-site solution, if you have a file server you will most often be using the local area network and not your external network connection. This is very effective from the perspective of speed and cost. When you start using the cloud for file management you need to be aware of the demands this will place on your network.
Upload and download speeds are important to user experience in cloud computing
When you open or view a file stored in cloud service this will typically involve a download of the file to your local computer. In this instance the faster your download speed, the faster the file opens from the cloud site.
When you save a file, or want to store a new file to a cloud solution, this will be uploading over your internet connection.
Often upload speed is slower, and commonly a lot slower than download. This can mean you will see a noticeable delay in saving files or uploading files to your cloud file storage solution.
To test your download and upload speed, you can use a speed test service like www.speedtest.net
To estimate the minimum time it will take to open or save a file base on your network speed, use the reference table below.
|
Connection Speed
|
1MB
|
5MB
|
1GB
|
|
56k Dial up
|
2.5 minutes
|
12 mins
|
1 day 18 hours
|
|
128k
|
1 minute
|
5.5 mins
|
18.5 hours
|
|
256k
|
30 seconds
|
2.7 mins
|
9.3 hours
|
|
1500k
|
5 seconds
|
27 secs
|
1.5 hours
|
|
8mbps
|
0.9
|
5 secs
|
16 minutes
|
|
20mbps
|
0.4
|
2.3 secs
|
7 minutes
|
|
24mbps
|
0.3 secs
|
2 secs
|
5.3 minutes
|
Improving user experience over a slow network
If network speed is a problem there are various ways of dealing with this:
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a) Save locally and background synchronise your files
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b) Work locally on the cloud server using web applications or a remote desktop client, avoiding the download and upload of entire files
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c) Increase the capacity of your network connection, particularly if your upload speed is low
In summary
Adopting cloud computing solutions will affect the usage of your internet connection.
Profiling the type of work that you want to transition to the cloud will allow you to select the most appropriate cloud service and network service for your needs.
By checking your upload and download speeds and estimating the amount of data that will be transferred, you can establish if your current network will provide a good user experience.
If not there are many ways to work around a poor network connection and still take advantage of the many benefits that cloud computing solutions can offer.