One of the most frequent concerns raised when looking at the risk of adopting Cloud services and SaaS - along with security and privacy - is that the underlying communications infrastructure (internal network together with external comms services) is not quite up to the job.

If true, this has the potential to put the brakes on the uptake of Cloud, as the fundamental promise of Cloud or SaaS is to abstract the application or workload to run as a service that is accessed via a wide area communications network or even the public Internet.

Many Cloud services are wholly dependent upon network connectivity in order to work effectively. If there are any issues with the network, it translates to potentially serious issues with application availability, functionality, performance and/or responsiveness.

The aim of this report is to investigate whether the point of view - that the network is a problem for Cloud adoption - is well founded or is more myth than reality. It is based on a study that was designed to investigate how the communications infrastructure is felt to be able to support communication intensive activities such as remote working and Cloud services of various types.

The study upon which this report is based was independently designed and executed by Freeform Dynamics and executed in collaboration with The Register news site. Feedback was gathered via an online survey of 161 predominantly IT professionals from the UK, USA, and other geographies.