Fortunately, with selected technology there is no need to choose between saving money and accelerating digital transformation initiatives. By investing some of their existing tools budget in advanced tech, they can increase the efficiency and ROI for many of their existing network and security tools.
For instance, for seven years running my company has been the IHS leader in providing visibility across all the data on a network and in the data centre, virtual environments and the cloud. What readers may not know is that two of our apps can also reduce network traffic and security tools by up to 90 percent. That means an increase in the efficiency of the tools already in place, realising a significant return on investment.
So let us take a closer look at some of the reasons why organisations don’t need a new budget.
Reason #1: de-duplication
According to research by the Public University of Navarre, duplicate network packets represent more than 50 percent of network traffic, in some cases even as much as 85 or 90 percent of traffic.
There’s no need for network tools to sift through and process all these duplicated packets. Although some network tools can perform de-duplication, these operations place a heavy burden on their resources.
It’s much more efficient to tackle de-duplication from a centralised point on the network and then share the clean traffic with all the tools that need to consume it. Look for tech that offers a centralised de-duplication solution that reduces duplicate packets by 50 percent in most cases.
Reason #2: application filtering
As more organisations move to work-from-home environments with heavy video streaming, application filtering has become more important than ever. An application filtering intelligence tool delivers the power to direct specific application flows only to the tools that need them.
By removing irrelevant or low-risk application traffic such as video streams, antivirus pushes and Windows updates, tool efficiency and effectiveness can be increased. My company has seen application filtering intelligence typically reduce traffic to tools by 50 percent.
Reason #3: flow mapping
Where application filtering works at the application level, flow mapping does its job at the port level, allowing a business to map the most relevant traffic, such as flows from specific TCP ports, to specified tools while filtering out the rest.
We hear of businesses that who have applied flow mapping have seen 20 to 30 percent traffic reduction to their tools.
Reason #4: network flow filtering
Network filtering provides another opportunity to boost tool efficiency. Using network traffic metadata instead of raw packets enables far lower amounts of traffic to be sent to monitoring tools.
An advanced app can generate full-fidelity, unsampled network filtering to remove the resource burden from routers and switches. The result can be a reduction of more than 95 percent in traffic to tools that rely on network flow, such as network performance monitoring tools.
Reason #5: backward tools compatibility
Finally, a chosen visibility and analytics fabric tool offers a cool feature that handles speed mismatches between existing tools and networks.
This means that by upgrading network speed, tools bought originally to run at 1 or 10 Gbps can be matched to run on 25, 40 or 100 Mbps networks — potentially saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in upgrade costs.
So what next?
Looking to the future, my company also minimises the need to add new tools capacity to a network to keep pace with increases in data growth driven by new digital transformation initiatives to meet market demand. That means that a technology return on investment increases year-over-year as a business grows.
