News: General: Bandwidth blues

WAN(ing) bandwidth crisis

The New Year should see lesser abuse of bandwidth and lesser queries on increasing bandwidth

<b>Prasad Ramasubramanian</b>

Saturday, January 05, 2008

MUMBAI, INDIA: For all those who spend priceless moments in your desks sitting and downloading free stuffs from sites such as µTorrent, watching videos on YouTube and Dekhona, 2008 would be bringing some bad news.

The New Year has made the heads of IT departments to take a close look at what is running across their networks, as many are worried about the increased operating costs.

Alan Leong, vice president and general manager -- Asia Pacific, Packeteer Inc. observes, “A lot of CIOs (Chief Information Officers) in India do not know what is actually running across their WAN (Wide Area Network). This is primarily due to lack of awareness.”

The IT heads have noticed the bandwidth levels shooting up in the daytime and congestions occurring due to increasing number of applications that are passing through the network and the levels touching the nadir at night.

On many occasions, CIOs have wondered the bandwidth levels remaining the same even after office hours due to a handful of hardworking souls.

Leong warns: “A lot of employees use the bandwidth for recreational purposes. They download applications using up the bandwidth. When employees start doing their personal work across the WAN, then the entire system gets blocked with non-business critical applications using up the entire bandwidth.”

If one takes a bird view of the WAN scenario in India and China vis-à-vis countries such as Australia and New Zealand, those countries are mature and aware of WAN optimization and employ a better management of their WAN infrastructure.

“Countries like India and China are getting to see the need for a WAN optimization. The consumers in these countries accrue more and more bandwidth to create their infrastructure without actually managing the existing capacity,” states Leong.

So, what are the for a CIO? The choice would be between meeting the recreational needs of the employees and bringing down the operating cost of the company. The IT head’s job just got simpler.

© CyberMedia News

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Justin Lofton said on 1/6/2008 10:07:22 AM:
Yeah, we are seeing a big increase in our WAN optimization business over the past 6 months. Most organizations are trying to consolidate IT, increase application performance across global WAN environments and save money. Its an interesting time in the IT industry. Justin Lofton

to Justin Lofton