White Paper. 5 Tips to Prepare Your Network for the 2015 Masters

Transcription

1 5 Tips to Prepare Your Network for the 2015 Masters

2 Executive Summary The Masters is one of the world s most widely viewed sporting events, and during the 2014 tournament, more than 11 million viewers tuned in to watch Bubba Watson win his second Green Jacket. This year, Tiger Woods will return to Augusta after sitting out last year, and viewership is expected to rise exponentially as the former champion hopes to win again. When you consider that your network today must support more users generating more activity across more devices than ever before, and that just one user streaming a single video can consume as much as 30% of a T1 or E1 connection, the impact to your company is significant. When you take into consideration that during the last Olympics, as much as 60% of all Internet traffic on corporate networks was wasted for recreational purposes, the impact that popular sporting events have on corporate network resources and business application performance is staggering. Since the 2014 Masters tournament, users have become even more reliant on social media and streaming for a connected fan experience. What s more concerning is that the Masters is shown live in the Western hemisphere during peak business hours, so rather than watch from home, your employees will use the corporate network to cheer on their favorite players.

3 Newer apps like Instagram, Vine, and Snapchat have quickly gained popularity, and old favorites Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube continue to consume valuable network resources every day. And with the ability to live stream all tournament rounds of the Masters online and access up to the minute stats from dedicated Masters apps, your users can essentially watch coverage anytime, anywhere, using corporate network resources to enjoy the event. In today s IT environment, controlling streaming video is a much more complex problem than just limiting bandwidth consumption. The bigger issue for your business is the impact this traffic has on your strategic applications. Recent research shows enterprises are five times more likely to cite user experience as a network priority than throughput, but 69% of IT managers say that ensuring resources for their business applications and delivering reliable user experiences is the top challenge they re facing. Unfortunately, for many organizations, the tools to monitor, analyze, and control network resources are not yet in place and many more companies have not yet taken an orchestrated approach to network management to coordinate all the key components of their WAN environment.

4 Assessing Your Network s Masters Performance To gauge your corporate network s performance during the Masters, the following criteria should be considered: Ability to Monitor Networks are more complex today than ever before. More applications, more users, more activities, more devices, more locations, and ultimately, more problems. Enterprises that monitor and manage their network through all five key network dimensions can improve user experience and reduce total network cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 30%. The combination of these five factors provides a complete picture of the WAN environment in which network policies can be applied. Networks without this level of insight can hinder strategic applications from performing reliably and hurt employee productivity. Ability to Analyze Being able to analyze, inspect, and distinguish between application traffic types on the network is critical to curb Masters streaming. The ability to view application traffic at layer 7 gives you the extra insight needed to understand the health of your network, so you can troubleshoot streaming issues faster when they do arise. For added insight, the ability to run a time-series analysis to pinpoint exactly when performance issues occur is critical to surviving social events like the Masters.

5 Ability to Report The IT department must be able to accurately measure user experience in terms of response time and application performance score to determine the quality of application experience. To calculate these metrics, IT must be able to generate purpose-built reports that track how well key applications are performing in order to measure and continuously improve network performance. Ability to Recommend Network managers and administrators are some of the busiest people in any organization. Because they are over-burdened, they are often left to troubleshoot network problems after they ve already occurred, rather than prevent them from happening to begin with. Having an engine in place that can automatically alert you when streaming applications are consuming too much of your network s resources makes it significantly easier to diagnose and repair issues quickly. Ability to Control In today s enterprise where users bring their own devices to work and social applications are used for both strategic and recreational purposes, companies need the ability to contain and control traffic based on the priorities of the business. Whereas most IT organizations have some type of compression or acceleration technology in place for strategic applications, without the ability to also control recreational traffic and applications, the problem illustrated by Masters streaming cannot be adequately addressed.

6 Ability to Optimize In order for your business to run smoothly, your critical applications need to perform reliably when they re needed most. Ensuring performance of key applications depends on your ability to compress and accelerate traffic. By reducing the amount of data transfers crossing the network, you can reduce network latency and ensure your business applications are always fast. Measure Your Network Readiness to Control Recreational Traffic Spikes It s important to accurately assess how your network fares during the Masters tournament so that the next big sporting event like the 2015 Pan American Games does not put your business applications at risk. Here s a framework you can use to measure how your network will respond to Masters traffic: Bogey Par Birdie Eagle Ability to Monitor Limited or no insight into the types of Internet traffic on the network. Insight limited to traffic protocols crossing the network. Insight into application traffic at layer 7. Limited ability to view within the context of the directory system (user, groups) or SLAs. Ability to monitor the health of the network in real time and gain insight into the amount of network resources consumed by users, apps, locations and devices. Ability to Analyze No insight into traffic patterns on the network. No ability to distinguish types and sub types of http traffic. Limited ability to view or understand traffic types crossing the network. No ability to distinguish between types of http traffic. Ability to view network activities but lacking insight to understand the amount of network resources users, activities, and applications and devices are consuming. Ability to analyze and identify traffic types by user, device, location, app, and SLA. Can analyze application traffic at layer 7 for faster troubleshooting.

7 Ability To Report Lack of ability to measure application performance or quality of user experience. Ability to measure user experience limited to anecdotal evidence from user complaints or support tickets. Some ability to measure application performance for some applications, but lacking insight into how to fix poor performance of business-critical applications. Ability to generate purpose-built reports that measure application performance for key applications on the network. Ability To Recommend Zero ability to study traffic patterns or changes in the network. Limited ability to determine network traffic trends. Lacking insight to make recommendations to improve network performance. Some ability to study network traffic changes, but no engine in place to automate network performance suggestions. Ability to generate purpose-built reports that measure application performance for key applications on the network. Ability to Control No ability to contain or control application or Internet traffic that is recreational or non-strategic to the business. Some ability to block application and other traffic entirely. No ability to throttle the amount of resources consumed by specific applications. Ability to assign maximum bandwidth allocations for specific applications traversing the network. Ability to study traffic patterns and changes in the network and generate automated suggestions to repair issues, adjust policies, and optimize network performance. Ability to Optimize No ability to optimize performance of key applications on the network. Limited ability to improve performance of business critical applications. Ability to accelerate traffic, but lacking insight into how to accelerate only strategic application traffic. Ability to deliver a high quality user experience by setting policies to accelerate business critical applications.

8 5 Tips to Prepare for the 2015 Masters 1 Implement a WAN Analytics Solution The starting point to protect user experience for your business-critical applications during a major sporting event is to implement a WAN solution that delivers insight into the applications and types of traffic traversing the network as well as the users, devices, and locations consuming network resources. Without this level of insight, it is not possible to effectively control Internet traffic. 2 Identify Your Top 10 Strategic Applications Create a list of the most important applications to your business for which priority SLAs must be applied. These are the applications that must perform reliably no matter what. Without a clear picture of your key applications, you cannot ensure they will always have enough resources to perform reliably. 3 Identify Your Top 5 Cannibalizing Applications Make a list of the five applications that cause the most headaches and use the most network resources. For many companies this includes Facebook, Netflix, YouTube and a variety of peer-to-peer applications, but making a top five list is critical to make sure they do not jeopardize the user experience for strategic applications.

9 4 Create Customized Application Policies Build simple policies to control the maximum amount of bandwidth (if any) that can be used by your cannibalizing applications, as well as policies to guarantee bandwidth to your business-critical applications. Best practice policies should only take seconds or a few minutes to create. 5 Automate Policy-Based Shaping By applying the policies you created to prioritize or control bandwidth usage based on the needs of your business, you can easily provide a more reliable user experience for the applications and users that matter most while keeping Masters streaming under control. Next Steps Do you suspect that users will be live streaming the Masters at your office and abusing network resources? Contact us today to arrange a 15 minute demo to see how we can help:

10 Exinda is a leading global supplier of Network Orchestration solutions that enable organizations to assure a predictable user experience for strategic business applications through policy-based WAN orchestration. Exinda solutions intelligently allocate network bandwidth and optimize traffic based on the priorities of the business. The company has helped more than 4,000 organizations worldwide assure application performance, improve the end-user experience, contain recreational applications and reduce network operating costs for the IT executive. Copyright 2015, Exinda Networks Inc.