We saw in part 1 of this study based on a panel of 48 networks representing an aggregated amount of more than 10 000 sites, that in average:
- Enterprises differentiate 69 key applications;
- They group these applications in 15 Classes;
- The number of applications and classes do not depend on the network size.
Let's see now how these enterprises manage their applications according to their criticality to the business. We classified them in four level of criticality: TOP, HIGH, MEDIUM and LOW. We voluntarily selected a relatively small number to get sure that the classification is really meaningful to enterprises: in a 64 value scale, how would you seriously compare level 43 with level 47?
Here are some examples of applications with their usual level of criticality (note that there are significant differences among enterprises, and we do not mean here that application A is always at criticality C):
- TOP criticality: SAP, ORACLE, CITRIX, AS400, Voice…
- HIGH criticality: LDAP, Video conferencing, SIEBEL, Intranet…
- MEDIUM criticality: NOTES, SHAREPOINT, Internet, Emails, File sharing…
- LOW criticality: File transfer, Antivirus, QUAKE, BITTORENT…
When studying how applications and User Classes are related together, it appeared that:
- The number of Classes is remarkably well balanced among criticality, with 3 to 4 User Classes per level;
- Application are also very regularly spread among business criticality, with an average of 15 to 20 applications per level;
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On the other hand, the volume of traffic over networks is not balanced: the higher is the importance of applications to the business, the lower is the % of network usage. TOP critical applications represent only a very small amount (3.3%) of the total of traffic, while LOW critical applications take more than half of this traffic (54%).
3% of business critical traffic requires the same analysis accuracy than 54% of low critical traffic: this means that the need for deep understanding of applications traffic and performance over the WAN is related to the importance of these applications for the enterprise activity, not to the amount of traffic over the network.
On a personal note to my colleague Nigel, who loves to ask CIOs if they know the portion of their network that is used for business applications, I can now provide him with the (average) answer: between 3% (TOP) and 9% (TOP + HIGH) of the traffic, for 15 to 30 critical applications.
In the next part of this study, we will see how applications can be split according to their technical characteristic (real-time, transactional, etc.).
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