“Enterprises of all sizes need to look at their network and the Internet in particular as one of their most strategic assets, and that starts with having very clear insight into the traffic that runs over it,” said Brendan Reid, vice president of product marketing at Exinda. “With that visibility, IT administrators often find that their most strategic traffic – the traffic critical to running their business – is getting the same network SLA as someone watching a sports video on YouTube. Until enterprises have policy-based Internet control in place, many will continue to struggle with the issues that an accelerating convergence of strategic and recreational Internet traffic is placing on their networks.”
According to Exinda, the top five Internet challenges for enterprises in 2013 will be:
1. Distinguishing strategic traffic from recreational traffic: The more enterprises move strategic applications to the cloud, the more difficult it will be to decipher what web traffic should be protected and what should be controlled. For example, how can IT management tell when YouTube is being used by the marketing department for a strategic campaign and when it’s being used to watch cute kitten videos?
2. Maintaining SLAs for newly migrated cloud applications: What will the network impact be as more premise-based applications move to the cloud? Enterprises and institutions will struggle to accurately model and maintain application SLAs through the process. How will SLAs change for an application that was once run on premise and now is running in the cloud?
3. Moving away from Internet backhauling: The volume of Internet traffic – especially strategic cloud and collaboration traffic – is making a centralised backhaul strategy next to impossible for the 70% of companies who have this practice in place. Going “direct to the Internet” from the branch will present a host of traffic management challenges for enterprises in the New Year.
4. Managing strategic use of social media: Recognition that the company now uses Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social sites for strategic campaigns presents a new problem: How do you build policy and intelligence into the network to better understand the context by which these applications are being used – to decipher when they are a priority and when they are not?
5. Controlling real-time video and collaboration content: Whether it’s a Google Hang Out or YouTube, the use of video in the enterprise is exploding and must be controlled. But what about the strategic collaboration video and voice like Microsoft Lync that needs to be protected? A complex challenge is emerging around these real-time Internet collaboration applications which can’t be optimized in the same way as conventional application traffic.