Tag Archives: Network performance

Webinar Recording: Take Control of your Network & Manage BYOD

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The more devices employees bring to work, the more difficult it becomes for network managers to ensure a good user experience. BYOD (Bring-Your-Own-Device) complicates how you manage bandwidth consumption and assess and fix application performance issues. View our webinar and discover how to quickly restore order to your network. Exinda can help you address the challenges of BYOD and assure a reliable user experience by improving visibility, optimisation and control—allowing your users to be productive from anywhere, anytime and on any device.

Web Demo: Cloudutils App Performance

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In this short webinar our Marketing Manager Vanessa Cardwell in joined by Rogier VANDERWAL, VP Cloud Services, Ipanema to deliver an overview and demo of our Cloudutils App Performance Solution. Cloudutils App Performance allows enterprises to take full advantage of cloud and internet based applications guaranteeing application visibility as a service. A simple, flexible cloud managed service from Netutils helping you improve user productivity, reduce user complaints and get the most from your cloud apps.

Cloudutils – App Performance in the Cloud. A new solution from Netutils

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Gartner predicts that by 2015, 42% of the UC market will be in the cloud. This coupled with the exponential increase in BYOD means that your network needs to perform at a higher level to facilitate live interaction and real time communication. As more & more customers demand solutions in the cloud Netutils are proud to launch Cloudutils our collection of cloud solutions including; Guest Access, RADIUS-as-a-Service and App Performance. In this video blog our Marketing Manager, Vanessa Cardwell is joined by Philip Smith, UKI Channel Director from Ipanema to give you a high level overview of our Cloudutils App Performance solution which allows Enterprises to fully take advantage of cloud and internet based applications guaranteeing application performance and delivering full visibility as a service.

Webinar Recording: Your BYOD Policy Part 2: Performance and Scalability

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Are you concerned with any of the following?

  • Latency & Interference on your network as a result of increased user activity
  • Seamlessly managing the performance of applications that require real time communications – like Microsoft Lync
  • The ability to cost effectively scale and maintain network performance as user demands for access increase

If you are an IT manager or decision maker and identify with one or more of these issues, then please take a look at the recording of our recent webinar. ‘Your BYOD Policy Part 2: Performance & Scalability’. This is the 2nd in our series of webinars covering the Juniper Network’s Simply Connected story. Part 3 will over Reliability & Management and will be held at 11am on Wednesday 16th January 2013. Please register here.

Webinar Recording: Your BYOD Policy Part 1: Provisioning and Security

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Are you concerned with any of the following?

  • Securely authenticating guest & employee owned mobile devices on your wireless network
  • Managing the admin overhead when providing network access to your users & guests
  • Providing mobile network users seamless access to corporate resources
  • Leakage of corporate data, network contamination and lost devices.

Then please take a look at our recent webinar above. This webinar is the 1st in our series of 4 webinars covering the Juniper ‘Simply Connected Story, please keep an eye out for details of parts 2 ,3 & 4 which cover, Performance, Reliability & Management.

You can register for ‘Your BYOD Policy & The Simply Connected Story Part 2: – Performance & Scalability’ by visiting our registration page here.

WEBINAR: 360 Visibility and Control of Your Business Critical Apps

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Do you need improved visibility & control of your WAN traffic to maximise user experience & network performance?

More & more companies across a variety of industries are investing in online tools, resources and portals that deliver continued control, actionable performance insights & user driven application optimisation. In this 30 minute webinar with Exinda we demonstrate a complete & cost effective wan optimisation solution for the branch network , showing you how to gain deep user & application insights and how to segregate & prioritise large, medium & small applications based on your business need.

The App World: Don’t Let Apps Cripple Your Network

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Do you really know how much of your network bandwidth is being used for business?

By Malcolm Orekoya, Senior Technical Consultant, Netutils

This post contains original thoughts posted by Malcolm Orekoya, Senior Technical Consultant, Network (Utilities) Systems Ltd. These views are his own.

We’re all too familiar with the world of applications, which are now available to users on a variety of devices, such as smart phones, tablets and laptops. As time has passed, network and security personnel are not only concerned with “bring your own device” (BYOD) and the issues that come with this, but now that there are over 500,000 apps available just for iPhone users and at least 320,000 apps available in the Android market IT Managers increasingly have to pay more attention to “bring your own application” (BYOA) issues in the workplace.

Users can walk onto your corporate network with their personal devices, which have their personal applications installed and utilise your network bandwidth/resources as they see fit, even if your policy only allows for internet access. This might not be a major problem for most applications that don’t access the internet or even for those that use very minimal amounts of bandwidth, but with certain applications such as the new BBC iPlayer “app”, which allows users to download BBC TV programmes through an internet connection and store it on their devices, your corporate bandwidth utilisation is likely to increase dramatically due to the size of these TV programmes and the number of users downloading programmes on your wireless network rather than at home in an effort to avoid any personal data allowance limits.

As more applications like these become more readily available across multiple devices and operating systems, network administrators need to be able to monitor their bandwidth usage and have clear visibility of who is using their network, what applications are being used and how these are affecting business critical applications. Once there is that visibility, user access to non-business critical applications can then be controlled in order to make sure the network is not adversely affected.

Suggested Further Reading: Exinda ‘5 Best Practices to Assure Your Network For the Next Big Social Event

Are unexpected bandwidth spikes causing issues on your network?

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Did you experience bandwidth issues during the recent Olympic Games?

By Dean Goldhill, Network & Security Specialist, Netutils

This post contains original thoughts posted by Dean Goldhill, Network & Security Specialist, Network (Utilities) Systems Ltd. These views are his own.

Here we discuss a solution to a common network issue you may have experienced following an unexpected bandwidth spike. If you’ve been following our round ups you’ll see that recently we’ve been regularly blogging and video blogging on how both enterprise and service providers can take control and accelerate their WAN traffic. And recently we’ve had an increase in calls asking for advice and direction on some typical network issues experienced during the recent Olympic Games.

The Olympic Games whilst being a unique event, in some instances, had the effect of highlighting network problems that already existed. The result being that some company networks just simply couldn’t cope with the increase in network traffic as users tried to stream video of the games or use personal applications at work and business critical applications suffered as a result. But the issues highlighted by the games should not just be seen as isolated events there are many other reasons why your network may experience a bandwidth spike and downtime can be costly and time consuming.

In this blog post we’ll walk you through a typical example we’ve recently been presented with from a company with a site-to-site VPN between themselves and 2 other branch offices.

Background: The set up at this branch office allows employees to work from one branch and connect back to the servers in their own branch offices. So for all these users all traffic, mail server, Intranet, SharePoint etc. all has to go via the VPN/Internet.

When the Olympic Games started, users started complaining about slow, unreliable service for business critical applications.

And it wasn’t immediately as the games started, it was as the word spread around the building, and more and more people started watching the games online, the normal business service just got worse and worse until about the middle of the first week these users started saying they pretty much couldn’t work at all. The issue affected about 100 users in total and that’s quite a loss of productivity!

The challenge for this company was that they had a lack of network visibility, they couldn’t see what was causing the issue and they had no control over how to fix it.

Solution: Following our initial site inspection and investigation we discovered that the issue was that the internet bandwidth was being chewed up by people watching the Olympic Games online.

Another factor which made a solution trickier was that the broadcaster streaming service used for the games coverage does not use the video streaming protocol like most other services. Instead it transmits over the regular HTTP (port 80) so the affected company’s proxy server which is configured to stop regular users using video streaming services, was not stopping any users from streaming content like the games.

Furthermore, it was very difficult to block the streaming services because the broadcaster use a large number of IP addresses for load balancing, and we also did not want to be to block the service from the broadcaster altogether.

We successfully managed to find the actual URL for the video streaming servers and blocked it via their proxy servers. This effectively stopped the vast majority of users from streaming the games.

But the point here is that ideally, we don’t want to block these services by using URL’s, we want to block them by using a product that understands the traffic at the application layer (layer 7) and be able to block (or control) them irrespective of where the traffic is coming from or what protocol is being used to deliver it. Regardless of whether your company applications are network or cloud based your network is likely to face performance challenges often exacerbated by events like the Olympic Games or BYOD.

As a result more & more companies across a variety of industries are investing in online tools, resources and portals that deliver continued control, actionable performance insights & user driven application optimisation. Exinda Edge is an all-in-one WAN optimisation suite designed specifically to deliver a complete solution for branch networks.

Suggested further reading ‘Exinda Edge White Paper – Assuring The Strategic Branch Office Network’