Today's networks are under heavy pressure to balance cost and performance. Cloud computing, video and data, the convergence of voice, and enterprise mobility, all add to its already demanding workload. An increasing number of applications, consuming more and more network bandwidth, in addition to a growing number of business users producing bigger and bigger volumes of data from these applications, is adding to the problem.
As applications become increasingly important to the success of companies, the user experience has become the new battleground of innovation. Users want to be able to access their applications anywhere, at any time, with no latency.
At the same time, the IT department is looking for ways to provide a consistent and reliable end-user experience on a plethora of devices, across multiple networks, and on applications that are all over the place. This situation is unlikely to change or get better, because technology and computer usage is growing at an exponential rate. The only viable solution is to find a means to improve the IT infrastructure and data flow management within the network itself.
Inspection alert
This is where optimisation becomes essential. Optimisation solutions are essentially a collection of technologies and techniques used to boost the efficiency of data-transfer across the network, and is a vital component to network management. It is the process of extracting the maximum benefit from the company's network, and at the same time lowering its operating costs.
This can be achieved by following several steps. The first step is mapping out the various application dependencies to get a better picture of the path of network and application flows. Following this, a full audit of the IT environment is needed to obtain a view on performance bottlenecks, inefficiencies, potential threats as well as disaster recovery. A deep packet inspection of how the business-critical services are performing across the network is also necessary.
Next comes WAN acceleration, to permit a greater amount of data to be transferred over the network, by taking away any duplication, and compressing the data. This enables the same network link to be used more effectively. At this stage, WAN governance can be applied to allow more mission-critical and important applications to take precedence during busy times.
Because optimisation is designed to ultimately improve application performance, TCP IP acceleration is a vital element, resulting in a user experience that is measurably up to 50 times faster than without optimisation.
The challenge in deploying business-critical applications globally is that the more latency introduced between the application and the user, the slower the application will seem to the user, as the session size will reduce over latency. This reduction is related to the way the TCP protocol was designed, requiring an acknowledgement before sending more packets or data. When high latency is introduced, the protocol sees this as possible packet loss or congestion, reducing the TCP IP window size and often resulting in retransmissions. TCP IP acceleration overcomes this problem by providing a local receipt or acknowledgement, ensuring the TCP IP window size remains high and reducing the probability of retransmissions.
Users want to be able to access their applications anywhere, at any time, with no latency.
In addition, data compression provides an average saving of up to 60% of optimised applications. This ensures more bandwidth available in the network, or the capability to reduce overall bandwidth requirements and save costs.
Similarly, caching and deduplication create an additional layer of network efficiency by intelligently reducing duplicate information sent over the network. This can be extremely effective in CDN network content delivery, where there is a significant rate of data duplication. Users can expect an improved experience due to duplicated information and files being available locally, while IT managers can expect a drop in their bandwidth usage due to the reduction of bandwidth requirements.
Ultimately, today's businesses are as reliant on their networks as they are on other utilities such as electricity. Accessing global applications through the cloud is one of many ways the network forms the backbone of the business, and yet gaining competitive advantage through these applications is reliant on addressing latency and cost.
There is no doubt the benefits of network optimisation are many: improved productivity, cost savings, and better utilisation of resources, to name a few. The sooner the organisation takes a proactive approach to the flow of data and its management, as well as the hierarchy within the network, the quicker the business will be able to realise these benefits. Network optimisation should not be ignored. Businesses wishing to thrive will ignore it at their peril.
Have you measured the latency of your network? Do you have fast, flexible and economical access to your business-critical applications with almost the same experience as if the application was used over a LAN or accessed from your own data centre?
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