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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Rochat noted that a business’s most strategic traffic is getting the same network SLA as someone watching a sports video on YouTube.<\/p>\n
“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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
These are the top Internet challenges for 2013, according to Exinda:<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
For example, how can IT management tell when YouTube is being used by the marketing department for a strategic campaign and when it\u2019s being used to watch rugby videos.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
How will SLAs change for an application that was once run on premise and now is running in the cloud?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Going \u201cdirect to the Internet\u201d from the branch will present a host of traffic management challenges for enterprises during 2013<\/p>\n
Recognition that the company now uses Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social sites for strategic campaigns presents a new problem:<\/p>\n
How do you build policy and intelligence into the network to better understand the context by which these applications are being used \u2013 to decipher when they are a priority and when they are not?<\/p>\n
Whether it\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n
A complex challenge is emerging around these real-time Internet collaboration applications, which can\u2019t be optimised in the same way as conventional application traffic.<\/p>\n
Top 10 tech trends for 2013<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Top IT predictions for 2013 and beyond<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Kaspersky Lab\u2019s sales growth slowed in 2011<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n