In today's day and age, many SMBs and enterprise-level businesses are "taking to the skies" with cloud computing. These companies realize that working in the cloud comes with many benefits -- including reduced cost of in-house hardware, ease of implementation and seamless scalability. However, as you will read on and discover - performance-impacting file fragmentation and the need for defragmentation still exists and is actually amplified in these environments. Based on these factors, it must now be addressed with a two-fold proactive and preventative solution.

Let's face it -- we generate a tremendous amount of data and it's only the beginning. In fact, findings included in a recent study by IDC titled "Extracting Value from Chaos" predict that in the next ten years we will create 50 times more information and 75 times more files. Now regardless of destination, most of this data is generated on Windows-based computers, which are known to fragment files. Therefore, when files are manipulated they become fragmented before even reaching the cloud. This occurs because as they are worked with, they get broken up into various pieces and scattered to numerous locations across the hard disk. The result is increased time necessary to access these files and affects system performance.

So how does the above scenario affect the big picture? To understand this, let's take a closer look at your cloud environment. Your data, and in many cases, much of your infrastructure, has "gone virtual". Users are able to access applications and work with their data basically anywhere in the world. In such an atmosphere, where the amount of RAM and CPU power available is dramatically increased and files are no longer stored locally, how can the need for defragmentation still be an issue?

Well, what do you think happens when all this fragmented data comes together? The answer is an alarming amount of fragmented Big Data that's now sitting on the hard drives of your cloud solution. This causes bottlenecks that can severely impact your mission-critical applications due to the large-scale unnecessary I/O cycles needed to process the broken up information.

At the end of the day, traditional approaches to defragmentation just aren't going to cut it anymore and it's going take the latest software technology implemented on both sides of the cloud to get these issues resolved. It starts with software, such as Diskeeper from Condusiv Technologies ( http://www.condusiv.com ), installed on every local workstation and server, to prevent fragmentation at its core. Added to this is deploying V-locity software across your virtualized network. This one-two punch defragmentation software solution addresses I/O performance concerns, optimizes productivity and will push cloud computing further than you ever thought possible. In these exciting times of emerging new technologies, Cloud computing can send your business soaring or keep it grounded - the choice is up to you.