From Bandwidth Management to Bandwidth Governance
Businesses today are highly dependent on distributed applications to support every aspect of operations. If these applications under-perform for remote users or fail, losses of productivity, revenue and opportunity inevitably result. It is thus critical to ensure the consistent performance of applications across the network. One of the gating factors controlling application performance is bandwidth. As more applications and services are activated on the network, they contend for the finite available bandwidth. Bandwidth can be an especially critical factor for companies with small or overseas locations that may not have high-capacity network connections to the data center. Typically, IT organizations approacthis critical relationship between application performance and bandwidth by managing supply. This supply-side management approach is characterized by adding more bandwidth or implementing technologies that prioritize use of the bandwidth that's currently available. But IT organ...