Enterprise-wide bandwidth utilization has, for some reasons dramatically increased in comparison to its expected growth and it shall continue to do so every year.
Over time this usage is going to increase beyond your workforce’s limitations, which poses an important challenge for IT teams.
Not only you need to deal with an ever-expanding end-users base, but you also need to deal with new services and applications adding to your organization.
Basically, every device with an IP address in your network utilizes bandwidth.
Usually, downstream traffic consumption is higher than the upstream traffic consumption.
Because not many users upload videos or content on YouTube etc. on a regular basis.
As per Arstechnica for an on-premise mail server, such a user would burn through about 7.5MB of external bandwidth per day; add a little extra for protocol overheads and the figure is closer to 8MB.
This averages out to a little over a quarter of a kilobyte per second over an eight-hour working day.
At such rates, even a relatively slow 8Mbps connection could support many thousands of users.
An uncached visit to the BBC News front page may provoke about 650kB of traffic; CNN, 900kB; The Verge, a truly astonishing 7.36MB.
Of course, browsers cache content aggressively to reduce the traffic burden somewhat, but web browsing retains the potential to use considerable amounts of bandwidth (Source:Arstechnica).
It’s not at all unusual to find the downstream bandwidth usage to be ten or even 20 times greater than that of upstream bandwidth usage.
Network Traffic Analytics or bandwidth monitoring as a tool can help you get this crucial information about upstream or downstream bandwidth usage that may otherwise stay unnoticed.
Why Bandwidth Monitoring is so crucial?
Monitoring network traffic is one of the most important aspects of IT infrastructure management.
The very first step in network management is to be able to measure its metrics.
The same thing applies to bandwidth, if you want to control the bandwidth usage, you should be able to measure it in the first place.
Without insight into what’s consuming your bandwidth, it’s impossible to ensure smooth availability of your business-critical applications and services.
As per the latest report on “Network Traffic Analyser” Market – Global Forecast to 2022, the global network traffic analyzer market size is expected to grow from USD 745.8 Million in 2017 to USD 1,631.2 Million by 2022, at a CAGR of 16.9% during the forecast period.
In-depth visibility into network security, the need for maintaining QoE and QoS, and growth of IT infrastructure are boosting the growth of this market worldwide.
It’s very easy for network traffic or bandwidth monitoring tool to help differentiate between normal network traffic pattern and abnormal/suspicious traffic pattern (a sudden spike).
Usually, malware often consumes a lot of network bandwidth, which the users themselves are unaware of.
In such cases, bandwidth monitoring can be invaluable in identifying or predicting security threats.
So, the big question is – how to optimize the utilization of your available bandwidth to ensure that your network keeps up with end-users’ expectations?
Getting the desired Visibility
Network traffic visibility is all about, how the network data is collected, aggregated, sorted, and then served to the IT infrastructure monitoring tools.
The amount of network traffic data being transferred by any modern enterprise infrastructure has been always in a steady state of growth, for NOC and SOC teams.
Your bandwidth utilization data holds the key to efficient service levels for your enterprise as well as the related security issues.
Hence, network traffic monitoring should essentially be a part of your IT infrastructure monitoring strategy.
Motadata supports NetFlow v5 & v9, sFlow, J-Flow, or IPFIX data from routers, switches, and other network devices, giving you end-to-end network traffic visibility.
Content Optimization for reduced Bandwidth Consumption
Dealing with ever-growing bandwidth usage wouldn’t be so bad if the services and apps did not require their own share of bandwidth to function.
Also, you can’t expect your end-users to always know how to reduce or minimize file size before sending it, or when to avoid usage of heaviest program files.
You should include necessary information about bandwidth consumption when your end-users receive any new software or hardware.
The most bandwidth-consuming medium is and will be video streaming.
Which means, all the video streaming in your enterprise will impact your already dwindling bandwidth.
So, as soon as you add video conferencing into the lot, then you’ll end up looking at a huge chunk of your bandwidth being used-up.
It is always the best option to make sure your business has the optimal bandwidth necessary for both present & future use.
Gone are the days of simply blocking the use of certain services and websites.
This kind of approach only descends towards a shadow IT, which in turn can potentially open up a huge jar of worms as far as it pertains to IT security.
However, exceptions are always there, let’s say you have some users who tend to utilize over the top bandwidth as compared to others, it might be due to many tabs of video streaming open all at once in their web browser.
The best way is to make them aware that their over-consumption of bandwidth affects others and also, politely educate the end-user on how to effectively manage resources in their machine.
Calculate Bandwidth
Make sure the monitoring tool you use can list the applications that are in use and show their network usage at specified time intervals to the users.
Motadata uses the data from flow-enabled devices to monitor bandwidth utilization by users, applications, protocols, and connections.
Network Traffic monitoring tools help in understanding how network bandwidth is being utilized.
Get real-time insight into bandwidth usage with customized reports like Top Applications by Traffic, Top Conversations by Traffic, Top Traffic Destinations by Host IP, Top Traffic Sources by IP address, Top Traffic Receivers by IP and more.
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