* Global market research group needs visibility to see what is happening and control to be able to affect the traffic that transits his networks
This newsletter will present a concrete discussion of what one company has been able to achieve relative to getting the visibility they need.
This is the fourth in a series of WAN newsletters on the topic of visibility. Whereas the previous newsletters have focused somewhat abstractly on the need for visibility, this newsletter will present a concrete discussion of what one company has been able to achieve relative to getting the visibility they need.
Andy Erickson is the Global Internet Technology Manager for the Millward Brown Group. The Millward Brown Group is a global market research company that currently has roughly 30,000 users that transit their WAN. According to Erickson, he has two major goals. One goal is to eliminate inappropriate traffic from the network. The other goal is to balance the need to provide his users with visibility to a wide range of Internet sites while simultaneously leaving enough bandwidth to support corporate applications. To achieve those goals, Erickson uses products from Blue Coat.
The fact that his company does market research presents Erickson with some unique challenges. For example, many IT organizations can simply block access to sites such as Facebook and YouTube. Erickson cannot take that approach because as he pointed out, “Cutting edge Web sites such as Facebook is where people want to market.” As Erickson explained, in order to be successful he needs a combination of visibility to see what is happening and control to be able to affect the traffic that transits his networks.
As noted, one of Erickson’s goals is to provide his users with access to a wide range of Internet sites while simultaneously leaving enough bandwidth to support corporate applications. He commented that recently they were having problems with users in South Africa complaining of unacceptable performance. Based on a combination of visibility and control, they were able to identify the Internet sites that were consuming the most bandwidth and block access to those sites. As a result, the users stopped complaining about performance.
Relative to eliminating inappropriate traffic, Erickson stated that his organization does not see its role as being “Internet police”. He added that they do not “sit there and baby sit everyone all the time”, nor do they “read everyone’s e-mail”. According to Erickson, they got started by identifying and eliminating pornography and gambling. Then they learned from their employees what they were either abusing, or in the case of the users in South Africa, using to extreme levels.
Erickson stated that before they deployed the Blue Coat products that, “I never realized how many radio stations were online.” He also pointed out whereas pornography used to be of major concern, it has been eclipsed by sites such as Hulu where people can go and consume huge amounts of WAN bandwidth by downloading television shows.
This ends for now our discussion of visibility. In summary, we believe that all too often IT organizations do not devote the resources necessary in order to get the level of visibility into their network that Erickson discussed. That is something we hope will change in the near term because as Erickson pointed out, having granular visibility produces numerous benefits. We will undoubtedly return to the topic of visibility in future newsletters.
