We stumbled upon an interesting article that was written earlier this year entitled the Hidden Cost of the Cloud which outlines the uplift in network bandwidth charges that could be incurred if you used a cloud platform, such as Microsoft’s Windows Azure, Amazon or Rackspace, to host your applications and/or data. Now we’re not making any value judgments around the author’s recommendation to “leave the cloud and buy your own bandwidth to the Internet –- you’ll probably save 50 percent of your monthly bandwidth charges”; however, we do know a thing or two about saving on the amount of network bandwidth that enterprises consume by deploying virtualized WAN optimization.

In large enterprise use cases where applications, such as data backup and recovery, consume a tremendous amount of network bandwidth, it was demonstrated that WAN optimization virtual appliances could reduce the amount of bandwidth required by as much as 90%. In one case, where a data center was backing up 300MB of data in continuous transmissions over a 10 MB network with 60 ms latency, they saw only 80 MB of actually network bandwidth being used.

So in any case, whether you are an enterprise trying to conserve the amount of bandwidth you consume or a cloud provider looking to pass some savings onto your customers (one can only hope!), then deploying virtual appliances for reducing bandwidth requirements is worth considering.