As access to e-mail facilities and the Internet become vital within any company, bandwidth is rapidly heading for the top of the "endangered species" list. However, when e-mail is used as a "toy" rather than a genuine business tool, the implications for that business can be serious.
This was the problem facing Imperial Online, an internal Internet Service Provider for the Imperial Group. Explains Mynhardt van der Walt, Imperial Online`s IT manager: "Inappropriate use of our online facilities meant our mail server was going down a little to often. We also found that those employees who genuinely needed the Net and e-mail for work purposes began to use it less and less and we can only presume this was because of the slow access.
"Through our firewall, we were able to see what people were using the Internet for and discovered that many employees used it for private purposes more often than for business reasons."
Logical, a worldwide integrator of e-business solutions and services, suggested to Imperial Online that it implements NetInforcer from Allot, a move which Van der Walt says turned them "from a hit-and-miss provider to one where we are able to give guarantees of service and access".
Allot is an Israeli-based provider of networking solutions that improve online performance and ensure the quality of mission-critical and time-sensitive applications running on IP networks. Its products allow network managers to define relationships between organisational needs and network infrastructure in order to achieve maximum efficiency from network and server resources.
"This product not only makes bandwidth available to the people who need it most, but it also monitors bandwidth usage and allocates it down to person level. We have also seen a dramatic turnaround in usage patterns among our staff. Once we cut back on general access, certain employees began using the Internet and e-mail extensively again, especially once they realised that response times and quality of service had improved considerably."
Van der Walt says that of all the solutions Imperial Online evaluated, Allot`s NetInforcer from Logical was the best.
"Logical`s close relationship with Allot means the company knows what it is talking about and it took us no time at all to decide on its solution," he explains.
"We needed quality of service and that is exactly what this product gives us."
"The move to this situation was so fast and we believe it`s all because we now manage and allocate our bandwidth effectively," Van der Walt says. Currently, 70% of the Group`s bandwidth is used for e-mail and more than 3 000 employees are being monitored by NetInforcer. However, Van der Walt envisages this number will grow substantially once Imperial Online extends its services throughout the entire group.
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