The Benefits of Bandwidth Management

Bandwidth management is a technique for prioritizing network traffic. Bandwidth optimization and management tools allow Wide Area Network (WAN) administrators to control traffic flow in such a manner as to ensure that critical business services and applications have a higher priority on the network compared to non-essential services. It is an approach that is used to manage quality of service issues such as network response times and download speeds for specific groups and users within the enterprise.

Traditionally, bandwidth optimization tools have been deployed near Internet gateways, data centers, remote office locations, and sometimes, near individual end point devices. Many major network device vendors these days routinely integrate capabilities for managing network bandwidth and Quality of Service (QoS) into their equipment. While such on-premise tools can be useful, they are often hard to implement and harder still to manage.

Recently, some vendors have begun offering cloud-based WAN optimization services for businesses that are unable to, or do not want to, handle network optimization tasks in-house. As part of their hosted services such companies monitor network traffic, measure data performance and prioritize traffic flows to ensure consistent quality of service. Many hosted services provide prioritization based on source of traffic, destination, service, user group or even individual users. Often, such companies offer guaranteed QoS levels for mission-critical applications like Customer Relationship Management and Voice over IP.

In addition to Layer 7 and Layer 8 bandwidth allocation services, some cloud WAN optimization companies offer highly granular bandwidth allocation services based on factors like time of day and even website categories. For example, some hosted bandwidth management companies can allocate bandwidth based on whether a user is visiting a gaming website, social media site such as Facebook or an email service. Such services can help enterprises prevent bandwidth abuse and optimize use of their network resources.

Importantly, many hosted bandwidth management companies offer network logging and reporting services. Such logging and reporting can help enterprises gain greater visibility into their bandwidth usage and consumption patterns. It can help them identify potential network bottlenecks before they become an issue. Many WAN optimization services also protect customer networks against malware and other security threats such denial of service attacks.