Limitless bandwidth is not a panacea for mission-critical application QoE

Imagine yourself driving on a very broad highway. Lanes are relatively empty and you can cruise along fast and peacefully. Then, suddenly, without warning, you find yourself in a massive traffic jam — a big truck has rolled over and is blocking all lanes of traffic.

This scenario is just an analogy to a situation that often happens in organizations with limitless bandwidth and no network performance monitoring tools in place. The network becomes congested or even suffers from costly downtime. IT managers often tend to think that, since bandwidth is not an issue anymore and they can always add as much bandwidth as required, it becomes less essential to monitor network performance and quality of service (QoS) & quality of experience (QoE) of mission-critical applications. However, just like on the highway, traffic and congestion might threaten network performance and mission-critical application QoE, even with limitless bandwidth.

Most IT managers know that such scenarios can have a severe impact on you and your brand image.

During my professional journey, I have seen many organizations of different sizes and industry verticals facing this very same issue.

Bandwidth Issues & Challenges

Despite “limitless bandwidth,” the chances of network congestion or even downtime increased among the organizations that did not deploy network monitoring and application control tools. These organizations share some common challenges:

• Network resources and bandwidth are utilized for recreational traffic by employees (e.g., Netflix streaming and YouTube videos). This type of traffic consumes a lot of bandwidth.
• Misconfiguration of IT tasks, such as patch updates or file transfers, executed during peak working hours. Such misconfiguration leads to bandwidth consumption by non-critical applications and increases the chances of a congested network.
• Lack of ability to block crypto mining applications, peer-to-peer file exchange, and anonymizer traffic. These types of traffic overwhelm and exhaust the network, thus exposing the entire network to downtime.
• Migration to the cloud of highly used applications, such as Microsoft 365 and Salesforce, will consume higher bandwidth than on-premise usage. This is because employees tend to use these applications extensively, which, when on the cloud, generates additional traffic.

Adding more bandwidth is not cost-effective because business application demands continue to rise, and network congestion will return. Therefore, practical experience shows that it is useless to add more bandwidth.

Gaining granular visibility into your network is the first step in effectively addressing this situation. Tools that can provide this visibility shed light on your network, enabling you to understand which applications are “driving” on your bandwidth “highway” and how your end-users are “cruising” along.

Allot Traffic Intelligence and Monitoring Tools enable you to understand what is going on in your network, which applications are running (including encrypted and anonymized traffic), and how your end-users use the network. In addition, advanced “Control” capabilities enable you to set up policy configuration rules to effectively manage and block all types of traffic that’s not critical for your business, to ensure QoS and QoE for your mission-critical applications.

In an upcoming blog post, we will share information about attacks we’re seeing that target security gaps, even among enterprises that are already running volumetric DDoS attack protection solutions. (Obviously, Allot has a DDoS attack protection solution that addresses this issue, safeguarding networks with protection especially for mission-critical traffic.)

Speak to  you soon on this matter.