key it trends impacting your network

There are a number of technology trends in the IT market that are changing the nature and pattern of network traffic. Increasingly the network is being forced to carry traffic that it wasn’t originally designed to, and this can have serious repercussions on the performance of any number of applications and technologies.

Consolidation: Data centre consolidation and server and storage consolidation and centralisation are having a major impact on how applications are delivered to end users. The majority of applications were not designed to be delivered over WANs and this is impacting performance. If traffic pattern changes and the application performance impacts are not considered, user performance will most likely be degraded by a consolidation project.

Web Applications: Many client and server applications are migrating to web-enabled applications, with more enterprise applications – SAP, Oracle, Siebel – being accessed via browsers. In general, web-based applications require between five and ten times as much bandwidth as client-server models due to the increased traffic – and there may also be latency challenges to resolve to provide acceptable end-user experience. SaaS applications will have similar impacts on network performance.

Convergence: Networks now carry voice, video and data traffic whilst most were on designed for data. Voice and video traffic are more demanding and need better performing networks to be seamlessly usable. Network performance characteristics such as latency and jitter are important to manage.

Globalisation and mobility: Companies that outsource or multisource parts of their operations to Service Providers all over the world can incur WAN performance problems. Today’s workforces are increasingly mobile and need high speed access to applications irrespective of how they connect.

Rogue and unsolicited traffic: There is generally a lot more user recreational traffic on corporate networks than organisations realise. Malicious traffic from exposed security vulnerabilities pose a big threat to corporate applications but also introduce large quantities of unwanted traffic on corporate WANs.