A new local company is preparing to go to market with a device that it claims will put network monitoring within reach of SA`s small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Johannesburg-based BandAide Systems is in talks with retailers and distributors to act as resellers of the new BandAide appliance. BandAide is going to market as a spin-off from a project developed for a particular Internet service provider solution.
BandAide Systems sales manager Barry Russell says one of the advantages of the system is that because it is locally developed, it is priced within reach of most SMEs.
"Very few SMEs would have this sort of facility or software in place, because generally these have proved too expensive for this market," says Russell. "BandAide will retail at just under R20 000, compared with around R38 000 for the next-cheapest imported option."
BandAide fine-tunes WAN and Internet leased-lines, and allows managers to monitor and control bandwidth utilisation. BandAide is strategically located at the network edge "watching" and providing detailed reporting on traffic traversing the network, recording which application protocols are consuming the most bandwidth, and identifying the most expensive users. The system established classes for the data types to be controlled, and can allocate bandwidth as a Committed Information Rate.
The system`s caching feature provides company management with complete record of HTTP and FTP statistics, recording all sites visited, downloads that have occurred, the time of day sites were accessed and the duration, as well as how much data was transferred. BandAide can also deny surfing and FTP download access to selected groups of network nodes, or to single stations.
Users are required to provide a valid user name and password, prior to being allowed access to the Internet. Users are also required to signify that they accept the company`s Internet and Web-use policy, and that they are aware that the company has implemented monitoring tools.
Russell says: "Simply knowing that a monitoring product has been installed reduces time wasting and misuse of bandwidth by employees as they are now less likely to surf undesirable Web sites or download non-work-related materials."
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