Without a doubt, cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in enterprise IT. The Gartner 2011 CIO Survey reveals that 50% of all CIOs expect to operate their applications and infrastructures via cloud technologies within the next five years.But will all enterprise applications move to cloud computing and be hosted by cloud computing vendors like Amazon? Probably not.According to recent IDC research (Source: IDC Worldwide Datacenter Trends and Strategies), a clear trend is emerging – cloud migration paths depend on the particular characteristics of the applications themselves.Applications with low delivery costs and low business value from an SLA perspective, like email, web conferencing and payroll, will transfer to the public cloud, especially Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Webex and Google mail for enterprise are examples of this approach.Mission critical applications with high delivery costs like ERP and database, however, will migrate to private clouds. The reasons are obvious. Cloud computing is an efficient way to save delivery costs. At the same time, enterprises own the applications themselves in their enterprise data center. So in other words, they will have less security and availability concerns.But what about other types of applications that are less mission critical but that have very high delivery costs? Virtualisation is the best approach to mitigate such cost issues. It’s now commonplace to see many companies deploying virtualisation technologies for file, print and for some development environments.Yet there remains some resistance to deploying cloud computing. Some CIOs have less interest in implementing cloud computing or virtualisation technologies on applications which are already easy and cheap to deliver but are mission critical. These types of applications like finance and data analytics will be delivered via traditional server consolidation approaches.IT systems will become more various, complex and hybrid in the following years as cloud computing applications co-exist with traditional application architectures. Going forward, it will become more common to see traditional server consolidation, visualisation, private cloud and public cloud applications co-existing on the same IT system.To ensure adequate performance and user experience for all applications, WAN optimisation must support optimisation for all delivery methods including private and public cloud, instead of focusing only on traditional server consolidation applications over WAN links.As a WAN optimisation solution leader, Blue Coat offers best-in-class data center-to-branch and data center-to-data center solutions to address the performance issues for data center consolidation, disaster recovery and private cloud computing. With Blue Coat, employees are guaranteed high performance and a better user experience for email, file sharing applications, for example.Traditional WAN optimisation solutions have been unable to optimise applications based in the public cloud.A cloud caching engine breaks this barrier by using a 'one-sided' or asymmetric acceleration technology that accelerates and optimises cloud-delivered (SaaS) applications without requiring a WAN optimization device in the cloud provider’s infrastructure.Virtualisation is an important technology for enterprises’ private cloud and traditional applications. Blue Coat uses a set of solutions to optimise and control virtualised applications as well. For server virtualisation, V2V, P2V and V2P traffic can be accelerated up to 5X faster. For desktop virtualisation, Blue Coat guarantees the performance of VDI over WAN links.With a comprehensive approach to WAN optimisation, a full range of challenges and opportunities for your traditional applications, virtualised applications, private cloud and public cloud applications as well can be addressed. Blue Coat enables a smooth and gradual cloud evolution without any compromise to performance or the user experience.At the same time, supporting all types of applications in one solution maximises cost savings and investment protection.