Internet Traffic Optimization for Enterprises

The AfricaCom 2012 team are delighted to welcome Ipoque as an exhibitor at the event. See below for their guest blog post on internet traffic optimization for enterprises.

Enterprise collaboration tools, FTP hosting, file sharing applications, customer relationship management (CRM) and sales force automation tools. Instant messaging (IM), Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony, records retention and email – all mission-critical business applications, all required to be up and running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Now, imagine doing business without these tools.

These applications are some of the most essential business productivity solutions in an enterprise arsenal, they’re also the most flagrant network bandwidth hogs – and without Internet traffic management solutions in place, you might one day find yourself stuck doing business without them.

If you’ve ever been working in the office when suddenly, despite a dedicated Internet connection, your connection slows to a crawl, you’ve likely fallen victim to one or more of these application bandwidth hogs. While Internet Service Providers equip their network infrastructure to meet today’s requirements when it comes to Internet data traffic enterprises do not have this special focus on data traffic. Thus the optimization of Internet traffic has often been neglected in companies, having above-mentioned effects. The solution often is another bandwidth upgrade or accepting the reduction of efficiency within the company.

Why Internet traffic management now?

The need for enterprise-level Internet traffic management solutions has never been more apparent than today. As more and more businesses enable remote workers, partners and even customers to log on to their enterprise network, they’re often not prepared for the crush of traffic flooding their networks. So the ability to identify, classify and prioritize network traffic according to enterprise-specific needs is essential to doing business in a Web-based world.

What's happening throughout the network grid? How are applications performing? How is bandwidth being utilized? Is user and application traffic being prioritized appropriately? And are there potential areas of severe network congestion on the horizon? These are just a few of the most important questions enterprise network administrators should be able to answer to ensure their networks can handle the weight of end user data demand.

There are two simple keys to Internet traffic management: 1) Priority management that favors important applications over less important bandwidth-hogging applications, and 2) Maintaining complete visibility into network behavior.

Whether VoIP, Web browsing or audio and video streaming (or a combination of the three) is your enterprise’s highest priority – the ability to give tiered priority status to business-critical applications ensures available bandwidth is optimized.

What will your organization do without Internet traffic management?

Great question. The answer is, we don’t know.

However, what we do know is this: the demand for always-on network access is only growing, while network capacity and bandwidth resources are limited. Enterprises, just like service providers, simply can’t continue to add network capacity for bandwidth hungry applications.

The only viable solution to preventing bandwidth bottlenecks, ensuring enterprise applications have the necessary bandwidth to complete mission-critical tasks and controlling network-related operating expenditures (all while ensuring QoS), is a high-performance Internet traffic management solution that supports your high-performance enterprise network.

Read more in our work in Africa by reading about our work in Burundi and Angola in a multi-billion dollar company in Africa.