Cloud computing resources are available over the network and can be accessed by diverse customer platforms. It other words, cloud services are available over a network—ideally high broadband communication link—such as the internet, or in the case of a private clouds it could be a local area network (LAN).

Network bandwidth and latency are very important aspects of cloud computing and broad network access, because they relate to the quality of service (QoS) on the network. This is particularly important for serving time sensitive manufacturing applications