IS Network OVC targets application performance as driver of business value

With the launch of its Network OVC (optimisation, visibility, control) solution, Internet Solutions enables organisations to achieve a consistent end-user quality of experience (QOE) as a means to increase their business efficiency and agility.

Internet Solutions (IS) Network OVC provides IS VPN clients with a single platform from which to monitor, control and optimise application traffic. The centrally managed offering integrates application performance management, intelligent flow control, prioritisation, caching, compression and acceleration.

IS Network OVC employs a form of 'IT housekeeping' that ensures sustainability and competitiveness. This supports the IS philosophy that every advance in technology must drive tangible business value.

"ICT infrastructure is required to quickly integrate a large number of new applications," says IS technology and innovation manager for connectivity services, Brett Steingo. "Providing consistent delivery of enterprise, mobile and private or public cloud applications is a growing challenge."

While QOE is a business necessity in and of itself, it can also be used to enable innovation, collaboration and productivity.

"With all the excitement around the expansion of enterprise mobility and the move to cloud computing, it is easy to neglect the underlying network requirements," says Steingo.

A significant impediment to employee productivity is reduction in application performance, usually caused by the increased demands placed on networks. "Providing a suitable service delivery platform is paramount and can no longer be achieved in the same way as when there were only three or four business-critical applications, e-mail and highly restricted Web browsing allowed on the network," says Steingo.

End-users are struggling to access and work with mission-critical applications. Organisations are therefore now calling for service level agreements (SLAs) that cater to application performance, in order to deliver a consistent quality of end-user application experience, rather than simply optimising traffic carried over the WAN and the Internet.

The process of understanding, prioritising and protecting application performance is enormously complex. This is achievable through network visibility, which allows network administrators to identify, pre-empt and resolve application performance issues. IS Network OVC addresses application performance concerns while empowering agile and cost-effective IT transformation, such as data centre consolidation, desktop virtualisation, cloud computing, software as a service (SaaS), and the adoption of collaboration and unified communication tools. It also lowers IT support costs by reducing change management and global deployment costs.

IS provides a 30-day Professional Discovery Service, a service offering providing visibility into, and an understanding of, an enterprise network. This network discovery is presented via detailed reporting, which allows businesses to create network policies aimed at prioritising applications, thereby controlling network and application performance.

Having experienced the change in network performance, clients are in a position to decide on the nature of the contract and application SLAs that will best suit their organisations.

IS Network OVC features can be implemented individually or applied as a complete solution to improve performance, reduce opex and capex, and optimise current IT resources.