Optimize Your Business and Cloud Networks

How multi-location organizations can overcome two network obstacles to innovation

www.earthlink.com

August 2015

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A stage-setter: Sherri’s shopping experience

Entering her favorite clothing store, Sherri receives a message from the store’s loyalty app: Her favorite brand of jeans is on sale. The store knows her purchase history well. She goes to the jeans section and finds her size is not in stock. No problem — she uses the app to order online at the sale price. Sherri expected a good customer experience, and that’s exactly what she got.Retailers and other organizations that serve customers at multiple locations face growing pressure to improve customer experiences across all channels — mobile, online, social, phone, and in-store. Sherri’s experience illustrates one chain’s innovative ability to deliver a superior experience by linking mobile, online and in-store channels.

At many organizations, however, innovation is being stifled by deficiencies in network infrastructures. Uncorrected, such flaws might cause a business to lose customers like Sherri, who will tolerate no less than a great customer experience.

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Percent of respondents face pressure from the business for technology innovation; yet, 67% face pressure from the business to cut costs.

Percent of respondents say it’s crucial for them to have absolute confidence in their technology performance. However, 78% are not able to quickly or easily guarantee application performance.

71%

76%

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IT and innovation

IT responsibilities keep expanding. In addition to ensuring the stability, performance and availability of mission critical applications, IT is expected to be the organization’s champion of innovation.

For many organizations, a top priority is adopting the technologies that will consistently deliver a more integrated and connected customer experience in all channels, especially physical stores, offices, and branch locations where customers are served face-to-face. Failure to act could lead to customers like Sherri taking their business elsewhere.

A survey by InfoVista1 (www.ipanematech.com) revealed what they called “the application gap,” which hinders an organization’s ability to innovate. This gap is driven by two factors:

• IT deals with competing priorities. 71% of respondents face pressure from the business for technology innovation; yet, 67% face pressure from the business to cut costs.

• Applications fall short of customer expectations. IT personnel struggle to bridge “the application gap” between their current service delivery and their aspirations to meet ever-growing customer expectations. Three-fourths (76%) of respondents say it’s crucial for them to have absolute confidence in their technology performance. However, 78% are not able to quickly or easily guarantee application performance.

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Meet two network nemeses

Optimizing your business and cloud networks will enable your organization to drive innovation and successfully launch new applications. But first, you’ll need to overcome two major obstacles:

• Bandwidth bottlenecks. IT executives don’t want to roll out new applications and services unless they are confident their network can handle the new traffic. But there are tradeoffs to consider between cost and performance. The cost of upgrading network bandwidth may make it difficult to reach management’s minimum ROI threshold for any given project — thereby blocking many innovative initiatives. Even if adding bandwidth is affordable, just buying more bandwidth rarely paves the way for innovative new applications.

• Risky, internet-based cloud networks. Many businesses are shifting applications to the cloud, including essential customer-facing applications such as order management. But they’re connecting to the cloud applications via the open Internet, which is inherently unsecure and prone to excessive latency. Just as inadequate bandwidth creates bottlenecks, excessive latency contributes to poor performance, too.

The two culprits often work in tandem, masking network design defects, slowing user response time, eroding current services and further hindering any moves to improve the customer experience.

The result is unpredictable application performance. You can’t objectively determine where you are today. More importantly, you can’t determine what your bandwidth requirements are moving forward, how to confidently take advantage of cloud resources, and how to best support the customer experience needs of all locations.

Overcoming network obstacles to innovation is a two-part process:

1. Right-size your network. You need enough bandwidth to power diverse customer experiences at all of your locations, but not at any cost. With the right tools, you can obtain deep application visibility and control to maximize bandwidth utilization. By taking the guesswork out of network capacity planning and design, you will be paying only for the access and capacity you need. As a result, you can provide a strong, yet cost-optimized Wide Area Network (WAN) to drive the customer experience initiatives that will help your business succeed.

2. Privatize your cloud connections. With the right combination of network options, you can address diverse location requirements, minimize latency and security threats, and still take advantage of the cloud’s scalability.

That’s the high-level “game plan” for optimizing the performance of your business and cloud networks.

Now let’s drill deeper into the two obstacles your network decision-makers must overcome to excel in delivering customer-delighting experiences across all channels.

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OBSTACLE #1: Bandwidth bottlenecks — because budgets can’t keep up with soaring demands for more capacity.

Smooth-running, customer-friendly applications need a robust, cost-optimized network with scalable capacity for high- and low-traffic locations. Today’s IT executives, however, often struggle to launch innovative new applications because of network shortcomings.

In particular, network managers don’t know whether existing bandwidth can support adding a new application. Lacking visibility into bandwidth availability and utilization, they can’t detect situations where lower priority applications might be “stealing” bandwidth from other applications.

Adding bandwidth, however, isn’t a panacea for delighting customers. As Telecom Association’s Bandwidth Management Buyers Guide noted, more bandwidth is a poor substitute for bandwidth management.

Obstacle #1’s solution

Don’t accept “add bandwidth at any cost” arguments. Instead, pay only for the access and capacity you need. You can take the guesswork out of bandwidth management and still satisfy unique location requirements. Here’s how:

• Assess your needs. Use professional network diagnostics to determine how much bandwidth applications need to perform optimally. Assess your WAN against current and future business requirements—learning the bandwidth, connectivity type, and network design that will work best for each location. Result: the WAN is designed to deliver consistent, reliable application performance in cost efficient ways for your entire business.

• Cost-optimize your network interconnections by gaining application visibility and control. Without seeing how applications are performing, you have to resort to guessing capacity needs. How do you know if a core workload is degraded by less critical, bandwidth hungry applications? Look for tools providing:

− Visibility and control to ensure that the right traffic is using the needed bandwidth.

− Visibility into how applications are running against their jitter, latency and packet loss targets.

− The ability to specify what applications use what networks.

− The ability to set performance benchmarks, with adjustments made automatically by the network.

− The ability to define policies to automatically divert and prioritize applications in failure situations.

In the past, these capabilities required expensive devices at each site. Now, a new technology is available that can deliver insight and granular control at a fraction of the cost.

As the cost of bandwidth drops, many business owners and managers believe that the easiest (and usually cheapest) way to troubleshoot data connectivity problems is to simply order more bandwidth from an existing or additional bandwidth provider or telecom carrier. … More often than not, adding bandwidth without adding bandwidth management tends to only disguise bandwidth problems until the problems get bigger and reappear at an even worse moment.”2

2013 Bandwidth Management Buyers Guide

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OBSTACLE #2: Risky, internet-based networks — because they leave the door open for security threats and latency issues.

Cloud applications enable you to move critical workloads out of the data center to enhance agility and to achieve major cost savings.

Public clouds, based on open Internet access, may be an acceptable solution for non-critical applications. However, IT managers have been reluctant to adopt that same solution for more critical workloads and data — for two reasons:

1. To access cloud applications, organizations often rely on direct Internet links, requiring separate firewalls for each location, adding cost and complexity. Alternatively, IT can route traffic from every location through firewalls in the corporate data center, and then through an Internet circuit to the cloud-based application — but this approach increases latency and introduces a potential bottleneck.

2. Denial of service attacks and other malicious activity continue to threaten the security and privacy of applications and their users, often preventing companies from taking advantage of scalable, cost-effective cloud infrastructure for enterprise workloads.

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Obstacle #2’s solution

Now there’s a game-changing way to improve performance for every location without jeopardizing security. The key is to access cloud applications through private connections instead of the Internet, effectively moving applications closer to their users.

Use a cloud connection service to leading IaaS, PaaS and SaaS providers. When configured with your private network, the service will isolate your applications from the Internet with less hops and lower latency. All it takes is adding another connection to your private network with a virtual circuit. These virtual connections can be configured through software, so there are no physical circuits to provision and no new hardware is needed.

By eliminating Internet access for key applications, you’ll achieve performance improvements from reduced latency and jitter. In addition, replacing Internet access with private connections can dramatically improve security.

With the availability of private connectivity to public cloud services, you can now continue to pivot to the cloud and enjoy all the savings and scalability that they can offer. Some leading use cases for the private connections to the cloud include:

• Collaboration. The nature of being infinitely scalable and on-net provides a great solution for collaboration apps within organizations that can also be extended to their business partners, either on-net or via Internet. So when internal collaboration is a requirement, private connectivity can be used for increased security and performance.

• Enterprise applications. your private network connectivity overcomes concerns about security and latency when considering internal-facing applications. So when you have enterprise apps (CRM, ERP, analytics, etc.) running in 3rd party clouds they can be accessed via your private network.

• Bursty workloads. Dev/Test projects, quarterly financial processing, and holiday/seasonal e-commerce all benefit from cloud capacity-on-demand over private connectivity. For times when you need added capacity, but the workloads require private connectivity and maximum performance.

• Disaster recovery. Create failover sites in third-party clouds that can be replicated over the private network and be rapidly (or automatically) enabled in the event of an outage. Schedule your data replication over your existing private network and allow users to connect securely to internal apps during a disaster.

• Migration strategy. As you look to turn down legacy platforms, the cloud becomes an option and your private network can be used to migrate applications and data, as well as for on-going monitoring, management and support.

• Point-of-sale. Businesses looking to move PoS solutions to scalable cloud infrastructure now have the ability to connect via private and secure access.

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Conclusion

Let’s summarize how IT can control network costs, improve application performance, and shift more resources toward improving the customer experience.

Here’s a straight-forward, four-step process that leverages new technology to optimize network performance.

1. Identify bandwidth bottlenecks by gaining visibility into applications flows at every location.

2. Take control and guarantee performance of critical applications by allocating bandwidth to application flows in real time.

3. Use the visibility you now have to reveal needs for more bandwidth. When that happens, use technology to dynamically allocate bandwidth over multiple connections.

4. After you have optimized your business network, look for opportunities to do the same with your cloud network. Adding connections to leading cloud and SaaS providers through your MPLS network provides several advantages:

• Performance. Because you no longer need to hub your users through an Internet gateway or firewall, your users get direct access to the applications they need, reducing latency. In effect, you’ve moved users “closer” to their applications.

• Security. Your traffic to and from your cloud infrastructure is inherently protected by the same controls that are in place on your existing enterprise MPLS network.

• Availability. Without the threat of a malicious attack, the availability of your network improves.

• Savings. Because these connections are software-defined, there is no need to provision dedicated network circuits in order to get this level of security. Also, the network can now scale with the cloud, eliminating the need to overbuild a dedicated, private network.

Contact us at 1-877-355-1501learnmore@elnk.com | www.earthlink.com

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Four steps to optimize network performance

Optimizing network performance works hand-in-hand with improving the customer experience in an omni-channel environment. Both are only possible when you can see what is happening in real time along the entire network. This calls for complete visibility and control of your end-to-end network operations, including cloud connections.

Understanding and establishing real-time traffic priorities and application usage can help eliminate bandwidth bottlenecks, serve diverse locations securely, balance cloud and private network resources, and meet escalating customer expectations.

Need Help?

EarthLink offers a variety of network technologies, tools and services to support network optimization and security. Let’s open a dialog about your needs and requirements.

SOURCES:

1 InfoVista

2 2013 Bandwidth Management Buyers Guide

Launch innovative

new applications to

enhance the customer

experience

Integrate your business

and cloud networks

Leverage dynamic WAN path selection

Set controls to assure

application performance

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Gain visibility into

location traffic

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