Wide Area Network Analysis

Understand the overall picture of hardware, software and network assets

The Issues

The leading network monitoring and optimization tools simply advise the physical status and condition of the WAN. These are helpful to engineering in provisioning and operations management. What they do not provide, in real-world terminology, is any insight into the transport of business services and applications that are being shipped between servers, or between servers and business unit locations. Heads of network operations therefore cannot accurately validate and advise how the business is using the network. Without holistic knowledge:

• IT and business operations are at risk
• Accurate costs of application transport are not understood
• Capacity planning can be over-provisioned rather than optimized before upgrading
• It is impossible to monitor, profile, analyze and report on network traffic in business terms

It is therefore impossible to optimize your service delivery for cost and performance.

Our Approach

Our approach is to use the data you already have about your infrastructure, network and business organization, and build a business intelligence model on top of it. We model the connectivity and transport of Business Services and Applications in terms that are meaningful to both the business and technical managers. With this knowledge you will understand what the business impact of making changes to the network topology will be, and what the impact on the business will be if the network fails. We record this business information within a data warehouse, so that we have a persistent model of the network. This helps detect and pick up application connectivity and the volume of data shipped by business applications, including those that have slipped through change management procedures.

The benefits

The WAN Analysis Service is delivered as a SaaS (Software as a Service) project. The main benefits are that you will be able to:

• Monitor, profile, analyze and report in network traffic in business terms Identify targets for WAN optimization
• More effectively anticipate which business applications or locations would be affected by an outage
• Evaluate business impact of WAN changes
• Analyze WAN impact of application deployment proposals
• Assess effect of IT infrastructure centralization proposals
• Analyze impact data centre deployments
• Apply cost models to services and application transport
• Hold a meaningful dialogue between IT and Business management on the use of the network by the business