Respondents to our InformationWeek Next-Generation WAN Survey are a highly connected bunch: 44% are tasked with connecting 16 or more branch or remote offices to headquarters or primary data centers, and more than half spend 11% or more of their IT budgets on wide area connectivity. So we weren't surprised when one respondent asked an interesting rhetorical question: "Shouldn't there be a Moore's Law of WAN connectivity?"

At least, we think it was rhetorical.

IT's frustration with the pace of service provider innovation is understandable. As with so many technology areas, from storage to app dev, user demand for WAN bandwidth is rising at a faster clip than what companies are willing to pay for, and providers moving slowly on upgrades isn't helping. IT must move to MPLS even as carriers try to squeeze a few more years out of their ISDN circuits. WAN-optimization strategies are poised to lose effectiveness even as providers stall on running new last-mile fiber.

But for most respondents, the biggest WAN game changer is the public and private cloud. Extensive use of public cloud services demands that we shift from the conventional WAN hub-and-spoke design to a distributed model, where services are delivered over Internet connections at each location, thus reducing the load over the corporate backbone. Private clouds, in contrast, bring increased focus on the hub-and-spoke model to afford IT control over latency, quality of service, circuit quality, and overall performance.

Companies considering WAN investments must understand their cloud strategies, the performance levels the business expects, and what it's willing to spend. Well-architected private cloud services will be superior to public cloud services that rely on the Internet, but that ...