WAN Governance

Bandwidth usage by the numbers

In conjunction with WAN Governance initiative, an approach that synchronizes application performance management directly with business requirements, Ipanema sampled 50 among its largest enterprise customers to understand their current bandwidth usage (see here for more details).

The rationale behind WAN Governance is to better align network performance according to direct business objectives. And in order to do that, we must start with an understanding of current performance and usage. By understanding the nature of data traffic on the network, the infrastructure managers can optimize performance and availability based on actual business usage, thereby lowering infrastructure costs and improving end-user productivity.

This analysis showed that the most critical applications account for only a small share of network usage—a mere 3%, up to 9% if we sum the [top+high] criticality applications—whereas the lowest priority applications eat up more than half (54%) of network resources.

Network Applications by the Numbers
(based on survey by Ipanema of 50 customers -10,000 sites)
69	Differentiated applications per enterprise
15	Families of applications, with 7 to 33 app. Each
4	Business criticalities (TOP, HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW)
3%	Traffic volume of TOP criticality applications
9%	Traffic volume of [TOP + HIGH] criticality apps
54%	Traffic volume of LOW criticality applications

The numbers tell an interesting story: the enterprises differentiate an average of 69 applications on their networks (even if some run a larger number of specific applications – the CIO of a international engineering company recently explained me that she identified 878 different applications across her global organization – birds of a same feather can easily be grouped, leading to a more manageable number). Enterprise applications were classified (and prioritized) according to four categories: top, high, medium and low. Top criticality applications require always-on availability with an immediate and direct impact on everyday business operations, such as SAP, Oracle, Citrix, VoIP, video conferencing; low criticality applications were those with little impact on business performance, including non urgent file transfers and personal/recreational applications like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Usually emails are classified in the medium criticality level.

This makes clear that bandwidth is not the main criterion to manage application performance. WAN Governance should apply the same granularity for network performance monitoring and analysis for each application to enable organizations to fully understand their applications traffic, however complex, and guarantee the availability of applications with greatest impact on business performance.

By analyzing critical sites and applications – in addition to measuring other core requirements such as actual delivered performance against current SLAs, technical network variances such as jitter and server response time, and indicators such as Application Quality Score (AQS) for data applications and Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for voice and video applications, enterprises have clear business priorities and a measurable set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for application performance over their WAN.

Automated management tools (such as the one based on Autonomic Networking) can then dynamically control the network and its traffic accordingly – driving to end-user performance guarantees and further savings at network and IT level.

Effective WAN Governance contributes to meeting stakeholder needs

Effective enterprise IT systems enable innovation, collaboration, productivity, business processes and financial performance. But in real life, poor network performance hinders these functions — increasing business costs and forfeiting revenue opportunities. For example, let's consider how applications that are difficult to access or slow to respond hinder the objectives of an e-commerce website or a call center that handles thousands of customer service calls every day.

The ultimate goal of the IT function is to make business processes and workforces more efficient — to maximize their respective business value. WAN Governance creates the visibility and control of enterprise applications and usage to achieve this ultimate goal. Let's consider how all employees are stakeholders in improving business performance – and how effective WAN Governance contributes directly to meeting stakeholder needs:

• End Users expect applications to be up and running 24/7 and responsive — as if they were the only user on the network.

By guaranteeing applications availability and responsiveness, WAN Governance improves worker productivity, customer satisfaction and relationships with partners who depend on access to your network.

• Application managers want to be sure that applications under their personal responsibility will be allocated the necessary resources at all times for all circumstances.

WAN Governance ensures "rightsizing" of network bandwidth for applications to deliver intended performance objectives under any conditions.

• The CIO needs visibility into network traffic to understand how applications are actually used, their contributions to enterprise productivity and to plan projects for greatest business value.

WAN Governance monitors applications performance and usage and dynamically manages availability. A wide range of customizable analytics — from C-level dashboards to drilldowns into the underlying details of network performance at enterprise and site levels — guide decisions for creating greater value.

• The CFO, COO, CEO and Board of Directors need to understand the relationships and overall performance of business applications on networks to assess business value and how future IT investments will actually improve business results.

WAN Governance provides analytics on current network performance and projected benefits of new network projects to speed issue/solution understanding and decision making at the highest levels.

(This post is extracted from the recent Ipanema WAN Governance Executive Primer white paper)

Application performance brownout: 5 minutes = 1%

What is the real cost of poor application performance for an enterprise? This is a question that IT managers always find tough to deal with. Whatever the aspect from which you try to catch it, it has a tendency to escape out of your hand.

Line-of-Business directors explain that when their collaborators get a poor quality of experience (QoE), not only they lose their time, but also it affects their efficiency, motivation and the average level of quality decreases. Would the employees be at the contact of customers? The business itself will be impacted. From their point of view, all these aspects combine to build a very compelling case for sustained user application performance: unavailable (blackout) or poorly performing (brownout) applications lead to enormous economic impacts for the company.

On the other hand, when carrying on our Total Savings Impact (TSI) study applied to WAN Governance in large enterprises, when it come to employees productivity, CFOs and CIOs more than often make the remark that "it is hard to evaluate", "no one will accept such high figures", or even "it's my business, let it with me please": poor performance impacts are evanescent and virtual threats that do not harm the business in a clear manner.

If we just look to employees lost time, simple math tells us that if we can save 5' per day (reasonable, isn't it?) for a 1,000 employees company, yearly paid at 50 k$, working with business applications and assuming that these 5' stay productive (why not?), the yearly savings are of 500k$+, i.e. approximately a direct gain of 1% of productivity (in other words, 5' per day represents 1% of daily working time). If we add the cost of housing, infrastructure, central services, etc. the productivity gain will even extend to other parts of the company (without speaking about more indirect impacts like customers' satisfaction and people's motivation).

Where is the truth? Of course, the easy answer is "it depends", or "who knows?" – Nevertheless it will be too disappointing to leave this topic totally unaddressed: at the end of the day, making an enterprise productive looks like eating an elephant: one bite at a time, day after day, topic after topic.

Illustration: "Le tricheur à l'as de trèfle" - Georges de La Tour (1593–1652)