Cloud computing usage is skyrocketing. According to industry experts, the market as a whole is growing somewhere in the area of 80 percent – in the developed world.

And as per analyst group Forrester (News - Alert) – albeit from a small base – and this in turn is diverting critical business traffic from LAN connections or dedicated circuits to DSL or fiber-based broadband access links to the internet.

James Staten, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, and co-author of several reports about cloud performance issues, said, “The biggest issues are cost,” said Staten. “More bandwidth costs more, WAN optimization costs more, caching costs more, and so on. Each business has to determine what customer experience they demand and how much they are willing to throw at the problem.”

As a possible solution, Staten recommended the usage of caches in order to resolve performance issues – especially as bandwidth alone doesn’t help much when the real concern is delay (which is a side-effect of the signals need to travel).

WAN optimization can also be of help, as it limits the “chatter” between applications and merges messages together.

But before implementing WAN optimization, Staten encourages companies to first. “You must test. Use services like Keynote, CompuWare Gomez or others to determine what the customer experience is like right now and simulate what it would be like as a remote service. Test the options you are considering, such as cloud or traditional hosting. But be sure to optimize the application, the route, and cache everywhere.”