Network emulation technology was originally designed to help network managers, IT operations teams and developers to create lab environments that simulate their actual network conditions for testing application performance in pre-production. These solutions allow organizations to use historic network performance data to create virtual testing models that generate information about expected levels of performance and help eliminate network performance bottlenecks before applications go into production. Providers of this type of technology include: Anue Systems, Apposite Technologies, iTrinegy and Shunra Software, while OPNET provides a somewhat similar solution for building network models. End-user organizations are reporting that the accuracy of simulated network environments created by these technologies is around 95% and that, somewhat quickly, these solutions pay for themselves. Some organizations that I have had the chance to speak with reported that their network emulation products have paid for themselves four times over in just labor costs alone, as they significantly reduced the number of incidents with application performance in production that IT teams had to deal with.

Network emulation technologies have been around for a while and even though they provide some measurable business benefits for organizations, they never reached wide-spread adoption in the enterprise. One of the main reasons for this is that many organizations are interested in using these solutions only when they are planning new technology rollouts or making changes to existing applications and, therefore, larger organizations that are building a lot of custom applications and have new rollouts almost on a weekly basis have been the main beneficiaries of these solutions. On the other hand, organizations that have only a few new technology rollouts per year have not been able to justify making investments in network emulation solutions. Vendors in this space have been trying to make their solutions more accessible to end-users by providing their capabilities as a managed service or adjusting pricing models, but the key obstacles for the wide-spread adoption of this technology still remains.

However, with the emergence of cloud computing, the importance of network emulation technology for end-user organizations could significantly change. Organizations that are considering deploying either public or private cloud services are looking to ensure that moving their business critical applications to the cloud will not negatively impact the quality of end-user experience. For many of these organizations, potential deterioration in the performance of IT services, due to moving them to the cloud, would diminish other benefits that they are looking to gain from cloud deployments. For that reason, being able to predict how applications will perform across the network, before they are being moved to the cloud, is of critical importance for these organizations.

Also, when it comes to deploying public cloud services, very few organizations are currently considering moving all of their business critical applications to the cloud. This means that some applications are being accessed over public Internet and others over more traditional private corporate networks. In order to make educated decisions about applications that could seamlessly be moved to the cloud, they need to have visibility into how these applications will perform across different types of network connections. Network emulation technologies could play a very important role in this process, as they can help organizations accurately predict how network conditions will impact the performance of applications that are being moved to the cloud. Being able to test application performance in simulated network environments also allows organizations to set expectations for application performance in the cloud and use this information to negotiate SLAs with their cloud providers.

For the majority of organizations, elasticity of the cloud (predominately public cloud) is the major reason they are considering deploying these types of services. These organizations are looking to move applications to the cloud when they are expecting significant increases in business demand for these IT services. Also, many organizations have been using the cloud as a testing environment for business applications and are moving applications that are being tested back to an on-premise data center when the testing process is completed. This proves that many of these organizations are constantly moving applications from an internally managed data center to the cloud and back, which also means that they are changing the types of network conditions used to deliver these applications to business users. In order to mitigate the risks of deterioration in the quality of end-user experience from these changes, organizations need to test application performance in different network environments and ensure that the network is optimized for the delivery of these applications.

Organizations used to depend on network emulation solutions only when they needed to either deploy new applications or services or to make changes to the existing applications. However, the deployments of cloud services are forcing organizations to test their application performance across different network conditions on a nearly regular basis, as they are looking to understand how applications will perform when being moved between internally managed data centers and the cloud. This trend can open opportunities for the broader adoption of network emulation solutions and increase their importance in the enterprise.