WAN Governance

The rise of the Killer-Apps

Just as consumers have seen widespread problems when using new data-intensive applications on smartphones, the same problem is also impacting the business world as corporate networks struggle to cope with new demands. Driven by the increasing proliferation of bandwidth intensive applications such as unified communication, video conferencing and collaboration software, as well as the trend towards cloud computing, networks are struggling to match the increasing demands placed on them.

A recent study analyzed responses from 550 CIOs and IT decision-makers across Europe about application performance and the problems they face ensuring users remain productive and that business apps deliver on their objectives. It revealed worrying trends, with 82% of respondents reporting speed and responsiveness issues within the last 12 months and nearly half of respondents commenting that those types of problem are becoming more frequent. Perhaps more concurringly respondents said it was business critical applications such as enterprise (ERP/CRM), voice and collaboration applications are the most likely to suffer from performance problems.

The survey also emphasizes a distinct lack of awareness amongst those overseeing networked applications. Many of Europe's businesses are 'flying blind', without adequate knowledge of exactly what is flowing over their networks. For example, 69% of respondents are not aware of how much network bandwidth each application they use requires, and nearly one in three do not even know the number of applications running on their corporate network.

Measurement of application performance is also fairly rudimentary in many cases with 55% of respondents admitting that they rely on the "final line of defense" (namely user complaints to the IT department) as their primary performance metric. In other cases a plethora of competing network level technical indicators such as 'jitter' and 'delay' are in operation. What's actually required is a simple, single KPI which provides an aggregate view on how well each application is performing which everyone in the company can understand and which can inform improvement. Today this management information seems to be lacking.

The study also charts a rapid growth curve for network capacity with a third of respondents saying they would need to double the size of their networks every two to three years in order to keep up with data growth rates. Finding money to finance that growth doesn't seem realistic as over half of respondents said their networking budget remained flat or decreased in the past 12 months. Ultimately the average cost of supplying applications in a large business is approximately $1,000 per user, per month and this significant investment in software and programs shouldn't be jeopardized by under investment in the comparatively minor networking budget.

The takeaways from the study suggest rather than simply throwing capacity at the problem there needs to be a change in mind-set. CIOs and network directors should be asking "what data traffic is really important to the organization?" "Can we do without certain traffic or can it be de-prioritized and prevented from running at peak times?" The "application performance crunch" is only set to be further highlighted during the Olympics as office employees stream sports events simultaneously, adding further strain to corporate networks across the UK and the world.

Béatrice Piquer-Durand

 

(Reprint from the Huffington Post)

Unified Communications – A perfect WAN Governance Business Case

Unified Communications (UC) offer huge opportunities for the enterprise, with benefits including improved productivity, easier collaboration, better customer satisfaction and ultimately, higher profits through more efficient teamwork and competitive advantage. But UC come with their distinct challenges and not every project yields the anticipated ROI.

Challenge 1: UC implementations are a significant investment. If they are to yield a good ROI and deliver a suitable user experience, then their performance must be guaranteed as they rely heavily on the Wide Area Network (WAN). Recent research about Unified Communications deployments demonstrated an average Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of $36 per user and per month, without WAN circuit costs and large distance charges.

Challenge 2: UC are made up of data, video and voice flows with dynamic, variable traffic patterns that grow or subside based on user demand. A single desktop video flow means upwards of 300-500 Kbps between branch office sites. In turn, this can result in UC applications impacting the performance of other business critical applications during peaks of high demand.

Challenge 3: UC encourage desktop to desktop video communication which is wonderful for productivity, but they place enormous strain on inter-branch WAN links that carry this traffic. Traditional static Classes of Services (CoS) are not able to match such complex traffic situations and overall business application performance is put at risk.

Scenario – Let's consider a company with 5,000 employees in the Professional Services industry that is deploying Unified Communications. The company has an IT budget aligned to its industry standard, i.e. $975/user/month (among which $320 is allocated to applications). A full featured WAN Governance system will typically have a TCO of $3/user/month (including central devices, management opex and unforeseen project incidents), for the following benefits:

• Guaranteeing the quality of the UC applications (an investment of $36/user/month);
• Protecting the performance of the other business critical applications (ERP, CRM, file sharing, cloud apps, Internet, etc.) against resource intensive UC (an average investment of $320/user/month);
• Automatic incident prevention, better helpdesk productivity and IT governance will save a very conservative $15/user/month;
• Delaying bandwidth upgrades by a few years, saving an average of $15/user/month;
• Optionally deploying hybrid networks for accessing large resources at low cost (e.g. desktop video), dividing the cost of incremental Mbps by 3 to 5.

Not deploying WAN Governance would jeopardize not only the success of UC deployment but also the performance of the other business applications. Unsatisfied users and business managers will complain, lowering UC adoption and forcing IT to upgrade the WAN at a high cost (without being sure of the impact).

Alignment with the company's strategic goals – Guaranteeing the success of its UC project, WAN Governance leverages the company's investment to improve its efficiency and productivity through better collaboration. Moreover, enterprises in the B-to-C sector will significantly increase their customer satisfaction and their competitive advantage.

Béatrice Piquer-Durand

Olympics are coming – time to panic? (2/2)

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Why bandwidth isn't the answer

There are two solutions: companies can purchase more bandwidth before the Olympics; or companies can use what they have more effectively through WAN Governance tools to regulate the flow of applications across networks. Adding more bandwidth isn't the solution. First, throwing money at the problem is not an option in our time of IT budget restriction. Second, non-critical applications will take much of the new bandwidth, making users of critical applications still experience poor performance. This is due to the way that internet protocol is designed. TCP (Transport Control Protocol) operates as a layer for protocol on top of IP. Designed with the internet in the 1980s to be able to share limited, poor quality resources, TCP is structured to seize all possible available bandwidth. This means more bandwidth, applied indiscriminately, isn't the solution for TCP applications. Moreover, video (over TCP or UDP) is now behaving the same, with dynamic codec using all possible bandwidth to provide the best available quality and web sites providing high resolution streaming… Who can rule all these situations?

It's not size, it's sophistication

The solution lies in having tools that allow an IT department to control applications as they flow across the network, according to performance objectives and business requirements. Such monitoring and controlling is known as WAN Governance. Through WAN Governance, IT departments can see how applications are moving, who is using them and for what purpose. IT departments can then prioritize applications accordingly and automatically control every single application flows.

If we think of networks as roads, and applications as cars, a WAN Governance tool might be a police officer. It can direct cars into appropriate queues. It can slow cars that are less critical to the business (for instance, the YouTube car) and prioritise those that the business depends on (such as the Salesforce or SAP cars). This then allows vehicles to get to their destination in a timely, secure fashion – regardless of the amount of traffic on the 'road'. It also prevent the government to build new costly infrastructure.

SAP or Olympics? Your business requires the former, your employees and colleagues want the latter… this is why the need for the control provided by WAN Governance is becoming more imperious than ever.

Béatrice Piquer-Durand

Olympics are coming – time to panic? (1/2)

The 2012 London Olympics are coming. Data centres and companies alike must be prepared, lest they risk the performance of business critical applications. What will these challenges mean for datacentres and companies? Why does application performance matter? And how can these challenges can be proactively handled?

The challenges of the Olympics

The Olympic Games threaten to stress UK networks like never before. BT, the official communications sponsor of the Games, announced that the Olympics are 'the most complex logistical peacetime challenge [they've] had to face'. Every second BT expects 6GB of information to travel across their Olympic-designated networks, equivalent to 6,000 novels, or the entire contents of Wikipedia every five seconds. In preparation, BT is investing 640,000 man hours into the Olympic project. O2 also is investing £50 million to increase its reliability around Olympic sites by deploying new temporary antenna.

It's no surprise BT is concerned about the impact of the Olympics on networks. Consider a related international event: the 2011 World Cup. During the World Cup, mobile bandwidth data usage increased by 24%. Web browsing traffic increased by 35% during match time. YouTube grew by 32% on post-match mornings, while lunchtime matches showed the largest bandwidth increase with 31%. Video streaming increased by 11%. Networks faced unprecedented traffic flows.

There are reasons to believe the Olympics will generate greater data levels than even the World Cup. Unlike the Olympics, World Cup matches are single events taking place at a single time, and after matches the crowds dissipate to wider areas, drawing on different infrastructure. Similarly, the World Cup takes place over a larger geographic area with stadia hundreds of miles apart, meaning communications demands are not so concentrated. The Olympics are a different ballgame. Closely concentrated, incredibly complex, the Olympics threaten to challenge networks like never before. Indeed, they will challenge networks as only one other thing can: the future, when such ever-active applications streaming to and fro across networks will become the norm.

What these challenges mean

During an average week, 56% of UK office-based employees watch online video while at work. Roughly 66% of UK employees indicated they watch more than one hour of online video per week from the office. A large portion of the Olympics will occur during business hours; employees will go online to track events. So take the traffic stats mentioned above, and expand it to – quite literally – Olympic sized proportions.

If companies aren't prepared, their business critical applications will be affected as they compete against YouTube, BBC iPlayer and online video for limited resources. IT departments need to know how to guard against this.

The failure of business critical applications can really cost an organisation. For instance, a high-volume online store bringing in £25,000 per hour could crash due to a single network failure. If the outage lasts several hours, the monetary impact can be quite significant. IDC recently estimated the cost of an 11-hour IT outage at around £600,000.

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Béatrice

http://www.silicon.com/technology/networks/2009/02/26/why-bt-is-panicking-about-the-2012-olympics-39399786/

² http://www.dcseurope.info/news_full.php?id=21116

The Economic Case for Cloud Computing (Part 2/2)

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Hidden Costs of Cloud Computing - So much of what makes the cloud beneficial to companies – its scalability, its flexibility, its collaborative nature – also adds expense. The fact that IT infrastructure is not in-house means that it's owned by someone other than the company, creating compliance and security risks. The storing of data on foreign servers creates concerns about compliance with privacy standards and regulation of data access. The increased use of cloud-hosted applications creates stressed networks. All these things, by requiring additional resources and manpower, add expense to cloud computing.

Securing Data in the Cloud - Security is an undeniable concern for companies. R&D procedures, clinical trials results, marketing information, industry sales details, and other company-sensitive information must be protected from falling into the wrong hands. Owing to the external nature of cloud computing, where third-party users may be managing servers, unknown personnel may have difficult-to-monitor administrative access privileges. Companies offering cloud computing don't simply allow these security concerns to go unaddressed; most provide extensive firewalls, security codes, and other business practices to build customer confidence and guarantee protection. Yet companies must likewise be active, through encrypting data, monitoring the activities of privileged third parties and demanding greater visibility from cloud providers about how they are securing hosted information.

Compliance of Data Hosted in the Cloud - Most data compliance laws and regulations were written under the assumption that the liable party controls both the infrastructure where data is stored, and the ability to make decisions about where that storage is located. This means that most compliance laws assign responsibility to the user of a cloud computing environment. Such laws have, in the past, tended to limit activity in the cloud to the manipulation of data that doesn't involve intellectual property or patents. To ensure compliance, companies must monitor the infrastructure of the cloud, made difficult by the ever-shifting, adjusting nature of the cloud. As with security, this activity requires a monitoring and service assurance operation to be established.

As IT Becomes less Complex, Networking Complexity and Cost can Increase - By moving to the cloud, companies simplify and streamline IT, concentrating it in a few locations – some of which they control, some of which they don't. This means that the link between the user of the data, and where the data sits, is more complicated than before. In a nutshell, the network is more important and vastly more complex than ever before. If companies can't deliver data, the economics of the cloud will be reduced. A wealth of research and information hosted in the cloud will provide no benefit if it can't move to where it needs to be. Likewise, applications hosted in the cloud will be pointless if a CIO can't guarantee their performance. If a company has 30,000 employees working from other offices, it's important they aren't waiting behind their laptops for applications to work.

According to Gartner, average IT costs represent €800 per employee - and the cost of the networks that support the delivery of that IT is only a fraction of the total. Nevertheless, a move to the cloud necessitates investment in the network. As users access more cloud applications, networks can turn into the London M25, with too much traffic competing for network resources. In this situation, rather than adding new costly lanes to the motorway, savvy firms are protecting the performance of business critical applications by practicing WAN governance. The basic premise is to build greater intelligence into the network so that when network resources are assigned priority is given to those users of business critical applications such as an ERP system, rather than bandwidth hungry applications like YouTube or Facebook. You can think of this like adding a priority lane to the motorway, or how Transport for London is planning to help athletes move around the city during the Olympic Games next year.

Conclusion - It is inevitable that business is using the cloud in some capacity. Users accessing applications such as LinkedIn or YouTube are already accessing this software as a service. Gartner, the noted IT analysis firm, has predicted that cloud computing revenues will top $150 billion by 2013 as a large number of firms change their IT model. When considering the cloud, it's important to remember there is no IT nirvana and not all costs are immediately obvious. Cloud computing requires a change in mindset as technical teams become responsible for guaranteeing service and application delivery, rather than 'doing' the nuts and bolts of IT.

(A full version of this article has been previously published on Samedan)

Illustration: « La fée électricité » (details), by Raoul Dufy (1937) – It is a really big painting… and other "fairies".