As I dig out from the recent Blizzard of 2013 here in New England, the thought of being somewhere warm in the South Pacific sounds pretty good to me. Rather than suffering from a sore back and chilled bones, I could see myself sitting on a beach, warm sun beating down and a frosty umbrella drink in my hand.

Yep, that sounds pretty good. But if I was a business located somewhere in the South Pacific, and I had to communicate and connect with my many global locations in a fast and reliable way, that remote location can easily become a liability.

That’s because, while the Internet can seem like a ubiquitous global phenomenon, not all internet connections are created equally. If my company is located in California and connecting to cloud-based services in Seattle, my connections will be fast and instantaneous. If my business is located in say, New Zealand, that Seattle-based hosting center will seem awfully far away.

So what are businesses in far-flung locations to do in order to provide fast and reliable connections to all of their global offices? If the business in question has a lot of cash at hand, they can invest in reliable but expensive MPLS connections.

But for less cash rich organizations, there are emerging new options that leverage the cloud to provide application optimization and acceleration while essentially bringing the data centers and globally remote offices much closer together.

In the Aberdeen report Network Optimization and Performance Management for the Global Organization, I analyze how global businesses are effectively linking their international offices. And I analyze how one specific New Zealand company was able to use emerging technologies to speed their connections to offices in China and the UK.

Jim Rapoza is Senior Research Analyst at Aberdeen Group.

Related Links:

Aberdeen IT Infrastructure Practice

Network Optimization and Performance Management for the Global Organization