Network Performance Problems? Not Anymore...

Cloud, Virtualization and Mobility are the three buzzwords that rule the industry today. Right from large enterprises to mid-market companies to small organizations, everyone today is now trying to move to the cloud, because that is the next best thing to do. With these technologies a world without limits is an easy option and not anymore just a rare possibility.

Speaking of enterprises, they no longer have an option to stay away from technology offering to increase their productivity, efficiency and consequently, their profits. Wired and Wireless networks are the backbone of the IT industry today and have dramatically integrated into business structures, so much so that they are capable of bringing down the entire system causing a companywide crisis.

While on one hand the dependence of companies on their IT infrastructure is increasing leaps and bounds, on the other the industry is facing the risk of a slowdown, resulting directly from compromised data-exchange speeds. With data in the form of video and multimedia increasingly becoming the most popular means of communication, information exchange is rising as the next big challenge.

So what do we do, when we have tremendous amounts of data that needs to be transferred across a wide-network, typically across thousands of kilometers away, within seconds? An obvious answer, we increase bandwidth.

This has been the attitude of CIOs consistently in the last two decades of information explosion. The Big Data phenomenon prompted organizations to continue adding bandwidth as a solution to information management problems. However, the truth is that this is not the most efficient solution. In fact, it is fairly safe to say that constantly adding bandwidth is a considerably inefficient way to deal with this crisis. This is primarily because this need for speed is only going to grow infinitely over time. And it is hardly practicable to keep adding bandwidth.

Then, we are faced with the question of how these networks can be managed, without essentially increasing bandwidth. And the answer is a Complete Network Performance Management solution.

To begin with, it is critical that organizations understand the problem in discussion. CIOs need to make themselves aware of their situation, misgivings of the system in place and the range of available solutions that can better address their needs. Taking a lead for their organization, decision makers will need to adopt the newest and state-of-the-art technologies in network performance management in order to gain an edge in the industry that works on the principle of ‘speed'.

The second step is to accept that the nature of data is changing and this change demands a change in our attitude in dealing with it. New trends like consumerisation of IT and social media have taken over traditional means of work and communication.

Most likely, the cause of a performance slowdown is either a loss of bandwidth to non-performing functions or a failure of application performance management. Globalization, Volatility and Virtualization are amongst the prime factors driving this change. And therefore, the newer solutions need to focus on addressing these root causes.

Some of the key solutions for enterprises today include Application-Aware Network Performance Management (AA - NPM), WAN optimization controllers (WOC) and Application delivery controllers (ADC) that help improve reliability, availability, scalability and security of their IT systems. While defining a comprehensive and exhaustive strategy CIOs should take the three-pronged approach for application visibility and enhanced performance to cater to cloud-based services.

WOCs and ADCs can help eliminate cloud performance issues. Further, a combined ADC and WOC strategy can accelerate both the public and the private cloud.

Lastly, usability is retained as the top priority of cloud computing. Interactive applications that rely on cloud computing infrastructure is managed to meet user requirements, needs and demands.

AA- NPM technology essentially improves visibility into the system, performance and offers advanced troubleshooting techniques for modern IT infrastructure. WAN optimization offers data de-duplication, transport protocol optimization and app-specific acceleration managing a wide area network to offer a LAN-like interface to centralized applications for remote users; so an employee accessing data from an office on the other side of the world, will feel like it resides right on his machine.

On the other hand, ADCs originated as server load balancing appliances, are capable of increasing scalability and resilience of internet-based websites.

With Complete Network Performance Management Solutions including all the best aspects of WAN optimization, de-duplication and application acceleration and features such as web-content optimization, security and reliability, high-performance is no longer just a technology dream. A world without boundaries is our privileged reality!