Art of Bandwidth Management

Acquiring additional bandwidth for your new app is not a new phenomenon, but are you utilizing the available bandwidth to the fullest? That still remains an art. Let's match this art with market trends and convert it into a science

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

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Today bandwidth availability is not at all a problem; there is plenty of it available with your service provider. However, in-spite of so much bandwidth, managing it still remains the biggest challenge for most CIOs. It's still something you can never have enough of. No matter how much bandwidth you buy, it quickly gets consumed and at the end of the day, you have to again opt for more. So what's the reason organizations are always short of bandwidth? There are several reasons for this, and in this article we will try to bring out those issues and also discuss some of the trends that are developing in the world of bandwidth to cope up with them. In addition, we will also identify the hot technologies that are driving bandwidth usage in organizations.

Today, the primary aim of CIOs is to provide high availability to their mission critical applications and to ensure maximum uptime for branch office connectivity. For this, both bandwidth capacity and availability must be ensured. This is always a challenge due to a number of reasons. The prime culprit is the increasing number of applications that require WAN connectivity, especially Internet bandwidth. For instance, in a survey that we conducted in Feb this year, we asked CIOs about which applications are they currently running over their WAN infrastructure. A majority of them (more than 50%) were already using it for running business applications like ERP, CRM, VPN connectivity, file sharing, and messaging/
collaboration. That's quite a mouthful, and yet an incomplete list. In the future, they also plan to deploy video conferencing, online portal for e-commerce, DR and BCP, and much more. Most of this requires assured bandwidth because it's all business critical. Add to this all the non-business critical traffic, and you'll be out of bandwidth in no time. So what do you do? How do you guarantee bandwidth? The easy way out is to procure more bandwidth, and the difficult way is to manage the existing bandwidth. Which path do you take? Obviously, it would be the easy way out, but then you can't continue doing that indefinitely. The good news is that there are several key developments in this area that are making even the difficult job of managing bandwidth easy. In this story, we'll take a look at some of these trends.

Applications currently running across the WAN infrastructure	WAN applications planning to deploy in the near future

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