Smartphone work-life blurring hits the cloud

...coping with the explosive growth brought about by the combined forces generated by mobile devices and cloud computing services.

It will no longer be enough to identify application traffic based on application or destination or even source. The growing conflation of work-life across devices and users means that a service provider will need to employ every tool available to address performance and availability challenges.

Cloud-computing models offer service providers the flexibility and adaptable provisioning of resources necessary to meet volatile demand for their services and external cloud-deployed application services.

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With a model that can automatically provision resources where they are necessary on-demand, the service provider can concern itself with employing the contextually-aware services of network and application delivery network infrastructure that will be required to maintain performance, security, and availability levels while remaining competitively priced.

Potentially new market strategy
Indeed, savvy service providers will note the conflation of business user and consumer and identify correctly a potentially new market strategy that employs cloud computing as the basis for a unified work-life access strategy.

Using context and intelligent infrastructure as the foundation for a cloud computing-based model lets the service provider apply infrastructure services appropriately to customer traffic and simultaneously support business and consumer access using the same resources.

Doing so reduces the complexity of the already complex architectures needed to support existing traffic while seamlessly scaling for growth. It also makes efficient use of resources by dynamically provisioning where and when such resources become necessary.

Service provider networks have always been the most challenging and demanding of environments. They require high-performance, high-capacity, flexible infrastructure and delivery and these demands are growing along with explosive consumer use.

The push to drive consumers to the cloud increases the burden on the service provider networks — not only to connect mobile consumers and business users with their clouds, but also to ensure the message of seamless, fast and secure user experiences can be realised.