Though cloud computing is no longer in its infancy, it's still uncharted territory.

During last week's Interop (News - Alert) conference in Las Vegas a number of industry vets told their stories during the session, "Clouds and Enterprises: Lessons Learned."

The panel of enterprise IT executives, including Mu Dynamics's (News - Alert) co-founder and CTO Kowsik Guruswam,  spoke about their experience with cloud computing platforms, with a particular focus on compliance, performance, and the support for legacy applications. What could they move? What broke?

Enterprises are now using cloud storage services at a rapid pace and are looking for qualified answers on how using a cloud platform can increase efficiency and ROI simultaneously, according to Interop organizers. The old model of purchasing expensive storage systems or using large amounts of tape are prehistoric, adapting a new approach to storage is necessary in today's tough economic climate as budgets continue to be slashed and performance upkeep is critical.

One impact of the movement to use more private and public cloud computing solutions is that it increases the likelihood that IT resources will be accessed over a relatively low capacity, high latency WAN. "Even worse," conference organizers said, "in some cases these IT resources will be accessed over multiple WAN links." 

Stay tuned to learn about performance challenges associated with cloud computing as well as myriad technologies and services that IT organizations can use to mitigate the impact of those challenges.