What can firms do to protect business critical applications during Olympics?
What can firms do to protect business critical applications during Olympics?
The London Olympics are just six months away and it’s time to take precautions to protect business networks from overloading under the pressure of extra traffic.
This is according to Dr Steven Turner of IT optimisation firm, Intergence, who claims that several things can be done by companies to protect their critical applications during the Games.
Despite best efforts to discourage it, many firms will find that staff members can’t help but stream video and check the web for all kinds of Olympics-related content next summer. This is bound to put extra pressure on networks and it is better to be prepared than live in denial and regret it later. Dr Turner explained, “If a significant event occurs, employees may visit video sharing sites such as YouTube to replay the event and share amongst their colleagues.”
He added, “Unless your business concerns following sporting events (e.g. online betting, news etc), you will no doubt wish to limit the impact this additional traffic has on the network.”
Dr Turner recommends that businesses identify their network traffic load and poor performance triggers by using a service like Visual Networks or Ipanema. These services can also be used to install intelligence traffic shaping devices that will keep non-critical traffic from causing problems for business critical traffic within a network.
Turner also advises that businesses use a WAN Accelorator, which can split streaming to allow for multiple videos to be aired as a single stream across WAN link. This keeps the amount of traffic over the network to a minimum.
His final tip advises firms to consider directing business critical traffic through the MPLS circuit, leaving the less reliable and cheaper internet links for the video streaming and browsing that will no doubt happen over the Olympics.
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