What’s another sign to me that cloud services are going mainstream? I was watching an episode of 30 Rock recently and it had a commercial from Microsoft with home users talking about going “to the cloud.” As more businesses and consumers use cloud services, the networks to access the cloud and the processing, storage and virtualization resources within it invariably could get bogged down. So performance will become a critical issue.
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With Google reporting recently that 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, it’s clear that online video is impacting everything from entertainment and education to customer service and a number of other areas of daily life.

And after the U.S. elections on November 2nd, it’s clear you can add politics to that list.

In past elections, the poor candidates spent endless days knocking on doors and standing outside grocery stores or other high traffic areas trying to meet as many people as possible to get their message out. Now, the combination of social media and online video enables them to quickly deliver a message to many times the number of people they could reach in person in a month, let alone a single day.

That’s probably why YouTube had more than 450 registered political accounts ahead of the recent elections with some of the most popular videos getting viewed nearly three million times! And it’s not just candidates in races that use video, everyone from President Obama to news outlets and special interest groups all are increasingly using online video to inform and influence the public.

Individuals can get into the debate, too – CNN’s iReporters and response videos on YouTube are examples of how people can use video to express their thoughts and views.

With politics increasingly using online video, what does this mean for data centers and networks?
With an hour of video generating 100MB, for low-end quality, that means the 35 hours of video being uploaded in the time it took you to read this post will require 3.5GB. HD would require approximately 100 GB. In other words, more video means more of everything – storage, servers, bandwidth, and a need to better
manage network performance.

Just imagine if Abraham Lincoln could have stepped down off a tree stump and instead recorded his campaign speeches with a Flip HD video camera, loaded them online, distributed them with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and made them available to everyone on the Internet – now that would be a must see ‘server speech’!

While “cloud computing” has been reverberating as a hot topic in the telecom and IT trade press for years, you know it is reaching critical mass when USA Today writes about it.

In fact, that story about how small businesses are able to leverage a host of services and applications delivered from the cloud is a good example of how confusing this phrase can be. Is the cloud a network-based application? Is it a service creation environment? Or is it the hardware and networks for service delivery? Or is it all of those things?
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The power and potential of the Web has likely never been more evident than it is today – reshaping the way consumers live and enterprises do business on an almost daily basis. Some telling indicators of this include:

• Cloud services revenues are expected to grow to $44.2B in 2013 (from $17.4B in 2009), according to IDC research.
• Netflix streaming video downloads outnumbered DVD rentals this year – the first time in the company’s history; and in fact, Netflix streaming traffic is now the largest source of U.S. Internet traffic during peak evening hours.
• Texting is growing faster than mobile voice or face-to-face communication among teenagers.

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