What's more important - an Oracle or SAP database running on a network, or people forwarding huge e-mail attachments and browsing the Web?

If your network is slowing down, reaching immediately for extra bandwidth is not the best solution. In the first of a new series of columns, CORMAC REID puts the case for bandwidth management systems that prioritise traffic according to a company's needs.

You cannot run an efficient business with poor LAN and WAN traffic management. The network is not an end in itself. It is a vehicle for the ultimate IT requirement - the application. If essential applications are not performing effectively on the network, then neither is your business. That is why corporations today need to consider the impact of their internal and external QoS (Quality of service) on the deployment of critical applications. Bandwidth management is a tool that establishes flexible policies for allocating resources according to business requirements and application needs.

Now more than ever before bandwidth needs to be managed. We all use a lot more than the 14-28kbs of a few years ago. That regime was slow and as far as everybody was concerned, that's just the way it was. However that was then, this is now, and now you can get bandwidth on demand suiting your ultimate applications needs.

Here's a sorry fact. Although performance and predictability should be the absolute priority for all IT managers in enterprise today, the winners in the battle for bandwidth on congested WAN access links tend to be non-critical, less urgent applications. Activities ranging from high capacity file transfers and Internet misuse to large e-mail attachments consume far too much bandwidth in return for their services.

If you are sitting at your desk as the IT /Business Manager and your network is crawling along, you can quickly identify that you do not have enough bandwidth available. People have been known to pick up the phone to their carrier or service provider and ask to have their 256k link upgraded to 512k and so on. Throwing bandwidth at the problem is not the solution. One needs to establish an approach to implementing secure bandwidth management policies.

In order to safeguard your QoS on your application performance you should outsource this initial requirement to an independent infrastructure and carrier provider. This organisation will classify your traffic, analyse its behaviour, enforce policy based bandwidth allocation and finally generate a comprehensive report. This report will help you to identify the bottlenecks and it will also make solid, proven recommendations on what is the best way forward for your organization. You may not need more costly bandwidth: you may just need to manage it more effectively.

There are many bandwidth management tools available on the market today from various manufactures. It may be sufficient to configure priority queuing, routing protocol metrics, and local sessions termination on your Cisco router. However should you require comprehensive reporting, PacketShapers Packeteer product is the ticket. Similar solutions are also provided by CheckPoint -FloodGate, 3Com and Nortel.

If you are running a small office, you are particularly vulnerable to poor application performance. Business-critical applications compete with less urgent traffic for limited bandwidth on small WAN-access links. All it takes is one employee who synchronises a laptop with the message server to jam a lower-end WAN for 10 minutes, leaving applications such as Oracle or SAP hanging in the balance. Not having a proactive bandwidth management solution in place will cost you more in either dial-up or leased carrier services than the initial set up costs involved.

In a major corporate or enterprise business, the network is the business. How you manage and implement its bandwidth determines success, competitiveness and efficiency. Protect your most precious resource, bandwidth: this will enable you to ensure higher performance across a range of services from e-commerce solutions to VPNs and from co-location hosting to intelligent buildings.

Identify the applications running on your network and how much bandwidth they are each using. Prioritise the traffic; establish a deliverable QoS to users. After which you can implement and measure achievement of Service Level agreements (SLAs). Should you lack the resources to implement this strategy, you should contact and outsource the task to an independent consultant for the best results.