Networks are now a necessity to every business trying to keep itself afloat in the 21st century. Years ago, businesses consisted of a couple of unconnected, stand-alone machines, which did the jobs that they were intended to.

However, nowadays each and every device, never mind computer, is interconnected, to create an integrated network. The majority of these networks are now also connected to larger ones, such as the Internet, or their parent company?s network, thereby creating a wide area network (WAN).

Not only has the attitude towards networks changed, but the applications have as well. The traditional file and print services now find themselves crowded by e-mail, Internet or intranet applications, and specialized application traffic, not to mention application and file consolidation -- thereby producing a completely new problem for the IT administrator.

Not surprisingly, this new phenomenon has vendors drooling. In no time at all, networking vendors are knocking at your door, trying to get you to upgrade your local area network (LAN) or WAN infrastructure, which means hours of downtime for upgrading, along with hundreds of thousands of rands being spent on new switches, routers and hubs.

This is a typical problem found in any international company. In SA we too face this problem, but we have a couple more which seem to be unique to us.

Bandwidth is an important item on the agenda of every local ICT manager and financial director. This is largely due to the fact that SA relies on a single telecommunications service provider with no competition, making cost control difficult.

No silver bullet

Exploring bandwidth optimization technologies is critical if businesses hope to maximize their current investments, as the introduction of a second network operator may not be a ?silver bullet? to bandwidth cost issues -- at least not in the next two years.

This is immediately apparent if we take a look at the results of the establishment of a second and third mobile network operator in SA -- the cost of airtime has not been reduced, and competitive advantage is achieved through ?packaging? and value-added services.

There are various factors, such as geographic distance, that influence bandwidth costs. The cost of bandwidth rises significantly over longer distances. This includes going outside the ?campus? or the country, making bandwidth more problematic over a WAN than a LAN.

To deal with the problem, companies are faced with two choices -- they can either purchase additional bandwidth, or they can optimize what they currently have.

Chris Norton, country manager of Citrix Systems, says that most of the time a company?s current bandwidth implementation is adequate. ?CIOs just need to sit down and actually monitor the trends of their bandwidth usage. Further more, they need to pinpoint what is ?company-critical? data, and what is ?non-critical.""

According to Norton, should a company simply add more bandwidth it would most likely find itself in the exact position a couple of months down the line. ?Should a company?s current usage be sitting at about 80%, and it purchases additional bandwidth, sure, the immediate effects will be quite significant. However, it is human nature that once users realize they can do so much more with the available bandwidth they will start doing just that. Before the company knows it, it will be in a similar position to where it was before it bought the extra bandwidth,? he says.

In general, bandwidth optimization is about cutting out unneeded traffic, and there are many approaches to take when it comes to this.

What to look out for

There are numerous ways to skin a cat when it comes to bandwidth optimization, comments Nevo Hadas, MD of Systemfusion.

Firstly CIOs can start looking at something called traffic shaping -- which basically means ?the alteration of a traffic stream on a particular connection to increase network efficiency.?

?Traffic shaping allows a network administrator to decide what traffic is important and what is not,? says Pierre Holtzhausen, a network specialist at DCC. Should a traffic shaping solution be introduced to the network, mission-critical applications, such as e-mail and CRM applications, will get priority over applications such as messenger traffic.

Another very effective bandwidth optimization technique is that of caching. ?Caching is typically something that would be done over a WAN link, say between a head office and its various branch offices,? comments Holtzhausen. ?The company would install a server at each of the branch offices and at the head office. Regularly accessed data such as a company?s local Web site can be cached on each of the branch office caching servers or, in this case, a Web proxy server -- thereby alleviating the need to transfer data over the WAN link whenever it is accessed,? Holtzhausen adds.

Caching also provides benefits over and above minimizing network traffic. Should a WAN link fail, users can still access locally cached pages.

Administrators who want to further optimize their network can start eradicating unneeded protocols from the network, says Holtzhausen. ?For example, preventing the FTP protocol from running on a network will not decrease the amount of traffic transferred, but instead will stop your usage from spiking all the time,? he says. Should a user decide to transfer a 3GB file using the FTP protocol, the protocol will tie up all available network resources until the file has been sent.

Holtzhausen goes on to say that companies wanting to further decrease the amount of unwanted traffic on their networks should start looking at getting rid of unwanted applications. ?Peer-to-peer networking generates an enormous amount of traffic. What is more, file sharing uses an incredible amount of bandwidth -- the traffic being transferred is hardly work-related at all,? he says.

He goes on to say that companies should also ban messenger applications, such as MSN Messenger and Skype. ?These applications do not generally use that much bandwidth -- however the point is that they do generate unwanted traffic. Besides this, employees tend to waste a lot of valuable company time chatting through these applications.?

?Enterprises are also facing the problem of spam,? says Hadas. ?Not so much incoming spam, as that is generally blocked by spam filters on the ISP?s mail server, but outgoing spam.? Hadas believes that a lot of spam is generated internally through employees forwarding jokes, pictures and other non-work-related e-mails to colleagues. ?CIOs need to enforce strict e-mail policies, and users not complying with these policies need to be dealt with.?

?Bandwidth optimization is something that SA companies of all sizes need to look at,? says Roy Blume, research manager at BMI-T. He goes on to say that both users and companies need to be educated in exactly what is out there in the way of optimizing their networks. ?Throwing more bandwidth at an already over-utilized network will not solve the problem for long,? he concludes.