Techniques for Bandwidth Utilization

Do you know who interacts with whom, when, and for how long and how frequently in your network? Network administrators must have clear visibility of bandwidth utilization using a robust bandwidth monitoring tool, to find out slow loading yet crucial connections, to plan out the capacity of network properly or to control the Quality of Service.

As a network administrator, you can optimize your network bandwidth consumption in numerous ways, and there are certain tricks worth trying out before you reach out for the hardware catalog and invest in expanding your IT resources.

An efficient network traffic monitoring helps network administrators with the visibility that they need to understand their WAN. In fact, network traffic monitoring protocols became so famous and crucial that in the year 2008, IETF released IPFIX, which is now NetFlow.

This blog is a second blog from the bandwidth monitoring series. In the first blog we explained the basics of network flow analysis. Following are some of the simplest ways to optimize your network bandwidth utilization and improve your network’s overall performance:

1. Visualize Network Topology
2. Network Traffic Monitoring
3. Optimize WAN with data compression
4. Schedule tasks for low traffic times
5. Closely examine the usage of cloud services
6. Minimize personal use of bandwidth
7. Implement load balancing

Visualize network topology

The first stage in bandwidth optimization techniques or bandwidth monitoring is to induce an in-depth image of network traffic. Not all networks are precisely the same, thus you won’t get off-the-rack recommendation on the simplest ways to improve performance out of your system.

As a network administrator, you already understand a lot regarding the priorities of the organization you’re employed for and its core business, however, you will not apprehend which secondary traffic is hindering up the network.

So, a glimpse of the topology of your network is very important, as is an audit of the applications and protocols that use the system most.

You would like to trace what proportion of traffic is internal, how many connections originate from the external world to the internal network, and a lot of incoming traffic travels across your cables.

Network Traffic Monitoring

With a mixture of traffic views, & application activity tracking with the help of bandwidth monitoring or network traffic monitoring, you’ll be able to see user’s accessibility reports.

Look, wherever most of the traffic flow happens and so reorganize addressing scopes and configuration. The aim ought to be to reorganize nodes so that most traffic is contained inside segments of the network, instead of forcing communication to travel all-round the system.

For example, the Human Resource department most likely generates tons of email traffic and often accesses the native printer. The sales, purchasing, and accounts department can habitually access the ERP and client support wants constant access to the CRM system.

These are 3 styles of commercial activity that regularly intercommunicate; however, the majority of the traffic is internal to every cluster. In these cases, cluster the resources accessed by every department among one subnetwork.

Don’t enforce a typical subnet size in every phase. you’ll change the number of accessible nodes in every subnetwork to suit the scale of that department and assign physical instrumentation to load a lot of bandwidth within the high traffic subnetworks.

While monitoring your bandwidth, you’ll notice that tiny low range of nodes generates most of your network traffic. Portion most of the infrastructure to those endpoints and your bandwidth are out there where it’s required.

Optimize WAN with data compression

Poor connections across the web that integrate remote sites and Cloud servers on business IT network will impair your application delivery performance.

There are steps that you simply might want to try out to enhance link dependability & speed. The standard of your web service may be a major influence on your inter-site link performance. You may think about upgrading your attempt to pick up performance out of your WAN.

WAN optimization may be enforced by trunking services to hold traffic to far-off sites. However, fund holders among the organization could also be reluctant to permit you to enter into costlier transport contracts.

The flexibility to collect performance information on your WAN and demonstrate that this can be the performance bottleneck is a vital demand of your NMS.

Schedule tasks for low traffic times

Similar to the long process of significant network traffic apps, you may lighten the load on the network by running admin tasks nightlong.

Backups are notably data-intensive, and if daily backups are acceptable, then schedule them to run off-peak hours. Of course, that policy won’t work for important information in several industries wherever live-duplication of information is important to confirm continuous service and stop the loss of client data.

However, even in such scenarios, some backups are often performed for long durations.

Closely examine the usage of cloud services

The quality of cloud services can rely heavily on your company’s operating practices. Your business would possibly collaborate with heaps of external firms, either for bought-in services or as a service supplier.

In these instances, putting all of the business’s supporting apps on the internet can aid communications and take away gratuitous traffic from your network.

A cloud configuration is extremely appropriate for corporations that use heaps of home-based workers or use freelancers. Calling centres do not need to have all of their incoming calls routed over your network.

Even workplace PABX systems might currently be provided from the cloud. Keep your information backups offsite if attainable. Feed gateways to the net directly into the users or servers.

Also, a metered cloud app or service lets you avoid these peaks in bandwidth utilization whenever you’re carrying out bandwidth monitoring leads to expensive downfall in customer service quality.

Minimize personal use of bandwidth

In the initial days of broadband web access, firms were least concerned regarding controlling the activities of each user. Staff checked their email on the workplace pc, for instance. Personal use will get out of hand quickly.

Before you recognize it, employees install their apps to urge livestock value updates or stream sports games during their working hour they work.

The board should take each possibility to forestall offensive material being downloaded onto their services or supporting illicit activities, like digital piracy.

Personal use of the corporate network impacts productivity, thus this is often not a matter that is just a matter of concern for the network administrator.

Implement load balancing

If your business needs essential services to be regularly available, you probably have tons of spare capability in your system and already use load balancers. A load balancer is often used as an additional resource in case another server overloads.

A typical example of this can be with internet servers. If server A’s queue is full, then divert new traffic to server B. However, that spare server doesn’t need to be available just only for overflows.

You may keep all of your servers active and distribute demand consistently. Such a policy avoids all traffic being targeted on one link then suddenly shift to a different link.

With ordered distribution, all channels get a lowered down and equal load. You scale back the bandwidth allotted to every link.