Enterprises continue to face complexity managing recreational, strategic video, Exinda reports

Wherever there's a live sports game or highlight video being streamed over an enterprise network, there's a network manager tearing his hair out trying to understand why there's not enough bandwidth for the company's critical Internet applications.

But a larger problem looms for many enterprises: more and more companies are beginning to use video strategically, and without understanding the context by which video is being used, companies are powerless to deliver the application SLAs needed for today's enterprises, according to a new video report from Exinda.

Jim Rapoza, Senior Research Analyst, Network and Application Performance at Aberdeen, explains that any company that is just looking at one type of traffic - such as video - and trying to control it will be unsuccessful.

"The successful companies are doing an overall approach to optimisation," Rapoza said. "They're getting all of their bandwidth control based on business rules and different application types. They're identifying recreational traffic, so they know the difference between a YouTube video for fun and a YouTube video for work. They know what their end-users are doing and are working to provide the best user experience possible."

According to Exinda, this echoes the fundamental shift taking place in WAN optimisation and network control, as focus moves away from throughput and towards a focus on assuring user experience SLAs. "Customers are demanding more integrated, almost converged solutions around this point of user experience, so that they can deliver the kind of SLAs they need for the different levels of traffic they have in the network," Brendan Reid, Vice-President of Product Marketing at Exinda, said.

"We're at a critical point for video in the enterprise right now, because when people speak about video traffic, they hear 'wasted traffic'," continues Reid. "Certainly a lot of video is recreational, such as watching cute kitten videos on YouTube or March Madness highlights. But the reality is, as we speak with companies, more and more they're talking about strategic use of video for marketing, training and unified communications. They need to know who is using it, what they're using it for, what network conditions exist, etc, so SLAs for strategic video can be assured and recreational video can be constrained. Three years ago, content was king; today, context is king."

To learn more about the impact of video on the network and how enterprises are successfully optimising their overall networks to assure critical application SLAs, watch the video report.