Cloud/SaaS. Am I missing something?

So Cloud/SaaS may make sense if you have users distributed all over the world accessing resources via the web.

But I’ve seen a recent trend of enterprises taking internal, on-prem applications and rushing to stick them up in the cloud. This tends to make performance for those applications much worse for enterprise users depending on the WAN configuration.

Look, no offense against SD-WAN, but I think it’s a fair statement that most enterprises are still using a provider managed L3VPN/L2VPN as their WAN. So, the vast majority of enterprise WAN is built that way. Usually Internet access in these environments is centralized at the Enterprise data center(s).

Depending on the size of the company sometimes you’ll see DIA at the WAN spoke, but usually not unless they have a UTM/NGFW appliance at every branch office. I know many National and Global corps may do that, but the vast majority of enterprises which are SMB and regional/semi-national usually don’t have UTM/NGFW at each site, so their WAN users only access the Internet across the L3VPN back to the datacenter.

This makes Cloud/SaaS bad. Because you’re adding significant latency between the users and the server. Depending on how robust they set up their WAN, they may have to send traffic across the country to their data center, and then back across the country the other direction to reach that cloud app.

This all leads to a traumatic user experience where everything will load super slow and anything interactive will be super laggy.

But the cloud has been sold to leadership as being better. It has more resilience and redundancy built into it, more robust with better resources, and it’s what everyone is going to. And we no longer have to worry about upkeep!

So that’s why the user complaints are met with outrage and accusations. IT said this would be better and now it’s so slow our business units have less productivity!

This leads to bad situations like “increase our wan sites bandwidth now!” “But sir, they’re using less than 5% of their bandwidth.” “I don’t care, the Chief of Sales is yelling at me get them more bandwidth!” One month later: “what are you guys doing?! He said it’s just as slow but we bought 10x the bandwidth!”

What is the solution here? DIA at every spoke? Does not scale well due to the cost of UTM/NGFW at every location. Bring applications back on premises? A non-starter for most enterprises who want to continue scaling back overhead and infrastructure. SD-WAN? It sounds like a silver bullet, but carries its own problems, and the industry is slow to adapt.

Am I missing something? Why are businesses rushing to the cloud, and then universally hating it when they get there? Is this merely a passing fad? Or will “solutions” designed to fix these self-created problems begin gaining more market share?