Discussing how enterprises organize their applications, we previously saw in this study (Part 1 and Part 2) that on average:
- Enterprises differentiate 69 applications;
- They group these applications in 15 Classes;
- 3% of business critical traffic requires the same analysis accuracy than 54% of low critical traffic
We will now try to understand how the nature of the applications impacts the classification. We sorted the applications in three categories: Real-time (applications that are sensitive to delay variation); Transactional (application with a direct interaction between servers and people) and Background (applications that aim mainly to transfer large data between computers). Here are some typical examples of such applications:
- REAL-TIME: Voice, Videoconferencing, NTP…
- TRANSACTIONAL: SAP, CITRIX, RDP, Internet, Collaborative…
- BACKGROUND: FTP, Email, CIFS, Antivirus…
When we analyze how the type of these applications has been taken into account by enterprises, we found the following results:
- The number of User Class is balanced between Transactional and Background applications (6 to 7 Classes for each), while we get an average of only 2 classes for Real-time applications: the diversity of the application in an enterprise IT infrastructure comes from the data applications, not from the real-time one;
- The number of applications follows the same rule: 5 Real-time applications to be compared to 35 Transactional and 28 Background applications. This outcome is in sync with the former one: few real-time applications while transactional specialized applications blossom across the infrastructure…
- … This is also confirmed by the volume of traffic: 4% for Real-time, 50% for Transactional and 46% for Background. This result being more surprising, as I previoulsy thought that Background and Real-time applications would represent a volume much larger than the Transactional traffic.
Now, if we look at how business criticality and nature of application combine with the volume of the traffic across the enterprise's network we see that:
- Real-time applications have been assigned to the TOP criticality level. This is clearly due to the fact that they are not elastic applications. There is no gray zone: a phone call works or not, that's it. So when an enterprise deploys voice or videoconferencing across its data network, they have to work. Period.
- Transactional applications are spread across criticality levels and concentrate (in volume) on the LOW criticality level. Even with human to machine interactions, they are not all that important to the business: some can wait a bit in case of too large usage of the shared network;
- Background applications have only MEDIUM and LOW criticality. This was clearly expected. Even if a file or an email can carry very important data (and honestly this is not always the case…), to postpone them a few seconds will usually not make any harm to the business.
Will all of this be stable in the future?
I'm convinced that the need for thin-grain classification will remain or even amplify: the need for control and network governance is increasing fast. As for the volume breakdown, we can probably expect that Real-time traffic will grow significantly because of VoIP and Teleconferencing (you know, the saving on travels, etc…). On the other hand, we also see that Web applications use richer and richer contents, files size (thanks, Microsoft) and email attachments either. Imho, we must remain humble and accept that we do not know exactly what will happen; this is why we expect to run all of this in a yearly basis.
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