Trends

Employees bogging down networks

Network Optimization

Recreational use of enterprise network resources is soaring. Employees’ instant messaging, downloading of music and video, and visiting social networking sites and news/sports sites are impacting the performance of business-critical applications–despite the fact that most organizations have policies in place to limit recreational use.

A study conducted at the recent NetQoS annual network performance-management technology conference says such recreational use is a problem on more than 60 percent of networks. The survey canvassed the views of more than 150 network engineers, managers and IT directors within large enterprises, strategic integrators and government agencies who attended.

“While focus in this area has typically been dedicated to employee productivity and IT security, recreational IT use, and particularly the increasing popularity of bandwidth-heavy Web 2.0 services, is now an important network-management consideration,” explains Steve Harriman, vice president of marketing at NetQoS.

According to the survey, recreational use is consuming an increasing proportion of network bandwidth, with 73 percent of respondents saying that more than 10 percent of network capacity is consumed by employees’ recreational use. More than 50 percent of respondents have seen an increase in recreational use over the last year, with 55 percent of those networks experiencing an increase of more than 25 percent.

Alongside growing recreational use, other trends causing performance issues include the increasing complexity and volume of application data, IT convergence, consolidation, and the rising number of remote users accessing the corporate network.

Two companies that are taking steps to improve the delivery of applications across their WANs are Tyco Flow Control and Global Marine & Aviation. Tyco Flow Control has installed Blue Coat ProxySG appliances to optimize its WAN by securing and accelerating critical business applications between its international offices. Global Marine is using Expand Network’s Compass Platform to optimize its network for application acceleration, file sharing and disaster recovery.

Tyco Flow Control faced overall productivity issues because the company’s WAN connections were saturated, and latency had become a significant performance issue. In addition to solving response time issues, the company wanted to lower its operational costs by optimizing its bandwidth usage.

Blue Coat’s appliances helped reduce response times to download files and e-mail attachments by as much as 400 percent. In addition, the company’s WAN links now only consume half as much bandwidth.

Since applications are key drivers of Global Marine’s business, the company needed to roll out an optimized ERP system for its day-to-day business requirements. One reason Expand’s hardware was chosen was its ability to cut down network latency, while accelerating standard and custom JAVA and HTTP applications.

“Today’s complex WAN traffic poses a real challenge for organizations,” says Jim Metzler, vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates, an IT consulting group. “No matter what an organization’s policy on recreational use of IT resources states, network professionals still need the capability to manage WAN traffic to ensure optimal application delivery.”

iPhones to Test Networks

Wireless

Now that the iPhone hype has settled down, network administrators can start to strategize on how to manage the newest end devices on their networks. According to Matt Bancroft, CMO of Mformation, managing and securing the iPhone presents a number of challenges.

According to Bancroft, industry data shows that the more complex the mobile device, the more costly it is to support. Today, the average support call for smart phones lasts 45 minutes, at a cost of $63/call (Source: Strategy Analytics).

With 4GB to 8GB worth of memory, security is a major concern for the iPhone, he says, which can expose corporate data to both hacking and theft. While many businesses have banned the use of iPods in the workplace, the iPhone is billed–and priced–as a corporate business tool. Companies should be prepared to incorporate the iPhone into their security and management policies.

On another front, Bruce Kushnick, chairman of Teletruth, a carrier customer advocacy organization, and executive director of New Networks Institute, a market research firm, cautions, “Before you buy an Apple iPhone, you should read the ‘fine print’ in AT&T’s wireless service contract. Most reporters have been praising Apple’s new phone. Yet, it is clear the reporters missed the main issue. This is a wireless phone and broadband service, and an AT&T control issue–not a techno-toy issue. And the fine print and tricks of the wireless trade are downright offensive and need to be addressed.”

ShoreTel Tops Again?

Convergence

ShoreTel is tops again, at least in the latest ratings of IP PBXs from Nemertes Research. The report calls ShoreTel’s operational start-up costs the lowest among the four vendors included in the survey of 300 IT professionals–Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and ShoreTel. Notably excluded in the report were Siemens, Alcatel-Lucent and NEC. A recent study conducted by Communications News, however, shows a different picture.

“For small rollouts, Cisco is more than three times as expensive as Avaya, and more than four times as expensive as Nortel and ShoreTel to operate,” the Nemertes report concludes.

Only 36 percent of those who evaluated Cisco chose to buy a Cisco voice-over-IP (VoIP) solution, the report adds, while 75 percent of those who looked at ShoreTelchose to buy a ShoreTel VoIP solution.

Communications News recently surveyed 122 subscribers, mostly IT and executive managers, on their voice network choices. The favorites for VoIP and other telephony gear among the group are Cisco, Avaya and Nortel.

When asked which vendors they considered the leaders in enterprise voice network products, Cisco was named by 76 percent, Avaya by 50 percent and Nortel by 49 percent (multiple selections allowed). ShoreTel came in ninth, with 7 percent, behind AT&T, Alcatel-Lucent, Siemens, 3Com and Mitel.

Questioned about which companies offer the best price and support for voice network products, respondents again put Cisco at the top (46 percent), followed by Avaya (34 percent) and Nortel (34 percent). ShoreTel again came in ninth with 9 percent.

Finally, when asked which companies they were most likely to purchase telephony products from in the next year, the top three again were Cisco (32 percent), Avaya (17 percent) and Nortel (14 percent). ShoreTel was mentioned by just 2 percent of those polled.

Customer data: still not top priority

Security

With more than 150 million data records exposed in the past two years, organizations face serious challenges in securing sensitive data. A recent survey by the Ponemon Institute underscores these challenges. The survey also highlights an organizational disconnect between the realization of the threat and the urgency in addressing it.

The Ponemon Institute, in a survey of 649 respondents that was sponsored by Application Security, found that organizations are wrestling with how to protect data from misuse by external and internal forces while expanding access to the same data to drive business initiatives. Highlighting these challenges, the survey reveals that:

• Forty percent say their organizations do not monitor their databases for suspicious activity, or do not know if such monitoring occurs.
• “Trusted” insiders’ ability to compromise critical data was cited as the most serious concern.
• Customer/consumer and employee data rank third and fourth, respectively, in regard to organizations’ prioritization of what must be protected.

“Unless organizations directly protect their databases, everything else they’re doing for data security is on shaky ground,” says Toby Weiss, president and CEO of Application Security. “Responsible organizations are increasingly seeking to enhance security, mitigate risk and address key compliance concerns as part of a comprehensive approach to addressing data governance within their existing IT infrastructure.”

Now they are ‘virtual’ workers

Remote Computing

The number of “virtual” workers and telecommuters is growing substantially, according to Nemertes’ latest poll on the subject. The study, based on five months of in-depth interviews with 120 IT executives, finds 62 percent of participants are planning to increase the number of their branch office locations, and on average, branch offices will grow 11 percent in 2007, up 8.9 percent from 2006. Driving the growth of the branch office is global expansion, employee attraction and retention, merger and acquisitions, cost savings, and environmental concerns.

More than 80 percent of companies are “virtual workplaces,” meaning at least some of their employees work away from their supervisors and/or workgroups. “On average, organizations classify 27 percent of their employees as virtual,” says Robin Gareiss, executive vice president of Nemertes Research. “The message from upper management indicates the success of the virtual workplace depends on three factors–IT infrastructure, ability to manage and ability to perform.”

Survey participants indicated that, on average, 17 percent of employees telecommute. The study found that growing revenue was the leading business driver, along with improving employee productivity. “The decision to allow or even to promote telecommuting depends, in large part, on the vertical industry or job function,” Gareiss says.

There was a correlation between an organization’s IT culture and its propensity toward becoming a virtual workplace. Those who defined their IT organizations as “bleeding edge” tend to have the smallest number of branch locations, but the largest percentage of growth in their branch offices, and the largest number of virtual workers.

Short Takes

County Communications

Smith County, Texas, is using a new countywide communications network based on Avaya Communication Manager telephony software. Avaya S8720 and S8500 Media Servers and Avaya G250, G350 and G650 Media Gateways run the software and power communications for each of 25 county office buildings. “For the first time, we now can forward calls and messages, pick up voice mail remotely and even have office calls ring on an employee’s cell phone when they are away from their desk,” says Harvey Tanner the county’s CTO.

Security Improved

The nation’s 13th-largest school district, Fairfax County Public Schools, is stepping up to the challenge of securing user identities and simplifying access to technology resources for its 164,000 students, their parents and almost 22,000 employees. The school district chose several Novell identity and security management solutions to automatically provision and deprovision users, manage user passwords and data access, monitor security incidents, and deliver audit metrics and reports. “In our previous system, it took hundreds of employees to manually manage and secure user accounts, while still ensuring adequate access and the flexibility to scale with population changes,” says Ted Davis, director of enterprise information services at the school district.

Mesh in Virginia

Radford, Va., has deployed hundreds of Proxim Wireless ORiNOCO AP4000 mesh access points as the communications platform for Radnet, the city’s new wireless network. “The final choice of Proxim mesh equipment was based on price, performance, functionality, feature set and reliability,” says Patrick McHugh, VP operations, for integrator Designed Telecommunications. The city selected Proxim because, among other reasons, its Wi-Fi mesh products feature a dual-radio configuration that increases system capacity by allowing one radio to focus on Wi-Fi access and the other radio to perform mesh backhaul duties.

DWDM for Library

The Library of Congress is using Level 3 fiber-optic links to provide the underlying infrastructure to the National Audio Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC). The NAVCC supports the preservation and digitization of the national copyright collection of films, television, radio and recorded sound. Under the terms of the multiple-year agreement, Level 3 has installed and will maintain the connectivity that extends the Library’s DWDM network. The Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with more than 134 million items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves.