One of the perks of going to school is the seemingly unlimited bandwidth available on campus for students and educators alike. But that blessing can also be a curse, as so many people try to log on at once – sometimes with less-than-educational pursuits in mind – that speed is slowed to a crawl, data takes an unacceptably long time to download, and everybody loses.
That was the finding from recent research by Allot Communications (News - Alert), a global provider of intelligent broadband solutions that put mobile, fixed and enterprise networks at the center of the digital workstyle.
In a case study titled, “Leveraging Network Intelligence for Smart Education Networks,” Allot notes that, “Educational institutions of all kinds have become the Internet Service Providers for their communities of faculty, students, alumni, and administrative personnel. The result is a 'hybrid' network topography that has rendered them doubly challenged to overcome the application performance issues associated with both enterprise networks and commercial Internet service providers.”
Among the challenges Allot cites are the aforementioned “recreational surfing” as well as:
- Quality requirements of a professor delivering a lecture via video conference to a global audience of students;
- Administrative personnel in the finance department accessing external banking information;
- Limited IT budgets.
There is also the consideration of remote students attending “distance learning” courses.
“With so many users (onsite and remote access) and applications competing for their share of bandwidth on the educational WAN, traffic is often congested and problems such as slow performance and greater downtime increasingly transpire,” Allot notes.
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But the company is taking a proactive approach, adhering to that old business maxim, “Don’t bring me problems unless you also bring me solutions.” To that end, Allot's traffic management devices use Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology to provide network visibility at the application level in real time. Allot's reporting solution also provides IT managers with a graphical depiction of how their networks (Internet, WAN and data center pipes) are being utilized, and offers a vast range of reports and graphs used for advanced usage analytics. Network managers use the Allot solution to monitor network usage in real time and generate customizable reports of long-term utilization, providing valuable information such as:
- Total bandwidth distribution over the entire network;
- Most popular applications overall;
- Volume of allocated bandwidth per application, per application server or per regional office;
- Most popular applications per regional site.
The end result is that Allot's NetEnforcer and Service Gateway (News - Alert) solutions for traffic management enable the effective implementation of a school’s Acceptable Use Policy through the creation and enforcement of QoS policies linked to each department, application and user. Further, Allot’s NetXplorer product provides a simple user interface that enables network managers to create policies that define the amount of bandwidth made available for specific applications during certain hours, thus prioritizing the applications accessed via the Internet.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi