Johannesburg, 19 Jan 2012
As IT departments focus on centralising and consolidating their infrastructure to maximise efficiencies, business is increasingly becoming more dispersed as branch and remote offices are opened in various regions, each requiring speedy and secure access to centrally located corporate applications. To address this scenario, network managers must carefully manage and control unauthorised applications using their networks in 2012 to ensure business applications perform at peak efficiency across the WAN.
Alan Rehbock, sales director, sub-Saharan Africa at Exinda, believes local IT departments will face 10 serious networking challenges in the coming year.
1. Negative user experience: Users are often frustrated when they have to wait for the system to respond; increasingly, this occurs due to unknown applications traversing the network, and the unknown volume of traffic each of these rogue applications are generating. The additional load compromises business-critical applications, the overall stability of the network, and the performance of legitimate applications. The result is a perception of inadequate network performance and a decline in productivity and rise in end-user frustration levels.
2. Compromised application performance: The more users connected to business and personal computing equipment at work, the heavier the corresponding load on the network will be, resulting in declines in performance. In the past, a user was classified as a single PC user; with the advent of smartphones, tablets and other network-attached electronic gadgets, the number of devices has grown exponentially. Network managers are often asked to provide accessibility for these devices and their inherent range of applications.
3. Rising networking costs: Throwing more bandwidth at performance problems only serves to increase the cost of the network without guaranteeing sustainable performance improvements or even improving application performance to desired levels. This also has the effect of cloaking network shortcomings.
4. Decreased productivity: As users occupy their time with non-business activities as a result of network slowdowns, their productivity decreases.
5. Difficulty in troubleshooting: Many companies realise they have a problem with network performance, but are not able to identify where bottlenecks exist or why they exist. To improve performance, network managers need to have complete visibility of all conversations and applications on the network to be able to proactively control what traffic is given priority to ensure legitimate business applications perform optimally.
6. Non-critical network usage: Allowing applications that are not critical to the business (such as peer-to-peer and other torrents) to have free reign on networks only serves to needlessly consume bandwidth and hinder the performance of legitimate business systems. Interestingly, in companies where social media applications such as YouTube and Facebook are important, non-critical network usage will still have to be eradicated to free up bandwidth.
7. Application chattiness and latency: The longer users have to wait for a response, the lower their productivity. Network managers need to ensure that branch workers are able to obtain `HQ-like` response to applications similar to users sitting in the same office as the server.
8. Limited bandwidth: Branches in remote areas are subject to poor telecommunications performance as a rule and effective WAN optimisation is critical to ensure they can operate efficiently.
9. Optimising application performance across the WAN: Preventing these problems requires a WAN optimisation toolset that operates at Layer 7 (the application layer), is able to peer inside browser-based flows whether in the clear or SSL encrypted, and controls traffic according to corporate policies biased in favour of legitimate business applications.
10. User service SLAs: Business simply needs the network to function and deliver a consistent and predictable user experience. Guaranteeing performance and realistic service levels for users depends greatly on network stability and effectiveness. This tenet is not possible without an efficient WAN performance management solution that keeps network managers abreast of WAN issues in real-time.
WAN performance will be a crucial issue for businesses in the coming year as IT departments continue to face pressure to do more with less. Unless IT controls its data communications carefully, costs will soar as productivity declines and business becomes more frustrated.
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