PC World published an interesting article last week that explores the relationship between bandwidth, the cloud and business ROI. We’re increasingly finding ourselves pulled into cloud projects (both before they go live and after they’ve gone wrong) so we’ve had a chance to build up our own intelligence on the topic.

The basic premise of the PC World argument is pretty straightforward – cloud computing has the potential to deliver huge operational cost savings to organizations IF (and this is the big IF) they can get a handle on the bandwidth demands. Their argument is that cloud implementations are failing because organizations aren’t listening to the needs of the network and, as a result, are finding that their apps are failing to deliver acceptable levels of user experience, their back ups are timing out and their databases are getting out of synch.