As networks and businesses continue to grow in a recovering economy, so too does network traffic. But as all this growth continues unabated, the question needs to be asked: Who’s watching it?
In a recent treatise on that issue from Allot (News - Alert) Communications, a leading global provider of intelligent broadband solutions that put mobile, fixed and enterprise networks at the center of the digital workstyle, this issue is raised and addressed.
“Mid-sized and large organizations are finding they must control network traffic behavior to assure that their strategic applications always get the resources they need to perform optimally,” Allot notes. “Controlling network traffic requires limiting bandwidth to certain applications, guaranteeing minimum bandwidth to others, and marking traffic with high or low priorities. This exercise is called traffic management.”
The idea behind this is that by managing your traffic, a company can better manage its assets, and more importantly, who has access to those assets.
“Today’s traffic management systems let network managers control network traffic flows based on application type, protocol type, source and destination addresses, and other variables,” Allot says. “To provide this level of granularity, traffic management tools operate up through Layer 7 of the OSI model (the application layer). These tools are software-centric, but are often embodied in standalone devices.”
So why should your company manage its traffic. According to Allot, there are many reasons that enterprises use traffic management to set and enforce traffic policies, including to:
- Guarantee minimum bandwidth to Citrix and voice over IP (VoIP) traffic at all times;
- Ensure that delay-sensitive VoIP has priority over other traffic types;
- Eliminate expensive, real-time international frame relay permanent virtual circuits (PVCs);
- Enforce service-level agreements (SLAs) with their WAN service providers;
- Block unwanted music or video downloads;
- Block all music file-sharing to avoid copyright infringement liability;
- Eliminate congestion in real-time data replication to mirrored data centers;
- Eliminate usage-based ISDN costs for videoconferences;
- Delay investments in additional network capacity.
In short, traffic management has become a fundamental element of network management in an era where enterprises and service providers are merging all traffic onto packet-switched networks. Converged networks afford many efficiencies and application innovation. But they also require monitoring and control to ensure that the various applications — all contending for a common pool of bandwidth — do not negatively impact one another.
Edited by Blaise McNamee