Internet challenges for SA business in 2013
Taking control of how employees make use of the Internet is amongst the top challenges for South African businesses this year, according to tech and netwroking company, Exinda.
According to Exinda, 2013 will see companies dealing with a rise in both strategic and recreational Internet traffic as more and more high-bandwidth applications and P2P traffic cross the network.
Brandon Rochat, territory sales manager for South Africa at Exinda, says that, as a result, businesses need to look at their network – and the Internet in particular – with very clear insight into the traffic that runs over it.
Rochat noted that a business’s most strategic traffic 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,” he said.
These are the top Internet challenges for 2013, according to Exinda:
Distinguishing strategic traffic from recreational traffic
The more businesses 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 rugby videos.
Maintaining SLAs for newly migrated cloud applications
What will the network impact be as more premise-based applications move to the cloud? Businesses 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?
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 during 2013
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?
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 optimised in the same way as conventional application traffic.
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