Consultancy WAN Audit

WAN Audit

Can you be sure that new infrastructure investments will pay off in improved performance? Will more bandwidth actually solve your performance issues? Does your current change control process truly ensure that new applications, services and infrastructure are safely introduced into your production environment? Is your infrastructure vendor selection aligned with business needs?

The Issue

Do you think your network needs more bandwidth?

With increasing pressure to reduce costs you believe that a reduction in bandwidth to each location in your organisation could save your company substantially

So lets say you have just doubled the bandwidth to each location but your end-users are still complaining about performance from your SAP application or the new Oracle Financials application or any other applications including citrix and RDP?

The Solution

Computrad are constantly faced with organisations having the challenge of how to improve network performance for applications, network bandwidth, and therefore increase the productivity of employees. Issues arise however when simply throwing money at bandwidth is not always the answer. Performance can still be slow, what is the next possible solution?
Computrad have an industry first by having a unique audit of your Wide Area Network (WAN). This is known as the Computrad WANAudit
Many of today's applications are vital to the operation of your business. But they also place a high demand on your network and its performance.

As budgets tighten and investment options increase, infrastructure decisions are getting tougher. It used to be all about adding more bandwidth. But today, network managers have to choose between QoS, WAN acceleration, caching, compression, WAFS, and MPLS solutions from many different vendors making many different claims.

Visibility is the first step in building an intelligent network.

You can only control what you can see! When it comes to managing your WAN, a picture is worth a thousand words. With unrivalled Layer 7 classification and monitoring, our network traffic audit service provides a view of exactly what applications are running on the network and how those applications are performing.

Eliminate the guesswork and determine precisely what is to blame for poor application performance. We will apply tools that will integrate transparently into your network, determine how WAN and Internet resources are being used, and provide an accurate path to fix network and application performance problems.

Key Benefits of a Computrad WANAudit

Increase visibility and simplify troubleshooting by isolating performance issues quickly.
Identify the true nature of traffic and differentiate between mission-critical, recreational, and mali cious traffic types.
Monitor utilization and performance by link, application, or users.
Track application response times and quickly identify if issues are server or network-related
Establish and monitor service-level agreements for critical applications or links.
Identify misbehaving users and malicious traffic.
Provide detailed performance diagnostics.
Measure network peaks, averages, top talkers and top listeners, network efficiency, bytes, com pression rates, bytes transferred and saved.
Measure response times across applications, providing network delay, server delay, and congestion metrics.

While you spend a large portion of your IT budget on business-critical applications, you find them contending with less important traffic for limited bandwidth. This causes congestion and seriously impacts the performance of your network and more importantly the applications.
The Computrad WANAudit offers a solution that gives you an understanding of how and why your applications are performing in their current manner. We send our industry leading experts to perform an in-depth audit of your Wide Area Network. So if you need more bandwidth, we will tell you definitively how much you need? If it is not needed then we will tell you that its not a bandwidth issue but simply one of better control and utilization. In both scenarios we can help you with your services.

Using our industry leading expertise combined with our years of experience in this specialist area of the market and our internally developed intellectual property we are able to non-intrusively audit your network without making configuration changes to router/firewall configuration, desktops or servers. After extensive data gathering and analysis, Computrad provides an expert assessment of your network environment informing of what applications are running across the network .As part of our expertise we have developed a deep in depth knowledge of the behaviour of many different types of applications across a network and how bandwidth utilisation is affected by the applications.
After reviewing the results of the audit we demonstrate graphically giving a visual indication of network performance and activity. Computrad will provide reports that focus on traffic flows, both inbound and outbound, the application’s bandwidth and transaction response time for each application.

The Computrad WANAudit identifies :-

Type of bandwidth needed for your existing infrastructure
Popularity of traffic types
Varying hosts
Web sites visited
How is link capacity divided?
How does email traffic affect network performance
Do you have too much bandwidth or not enough ?
Are employees utilising expensive company paid bandwidth for recreational or company prohibited/illegal applications.
Identifies bandwidth that can be freed up and reassigned to higher-priority applications
In depth results for the top five inbound and outbound applications analysis being performed on an hourly and daily basis.

Many of our clients are amazed at the fact they think they know what is running on their network and in fact are surprised at how many other applications and bandwidth hungry and unnecessary protocols are actually running in reality.

The Computrad WANAudit allows you to make policy, network, and bandwidth decisions for a fully productive environment. The Computrad WANAudit will provide several recommendations to optimize your existing network. If serious issues are diagnosed, a remediation plan is offered to improve the efficiency of your network as quickly as possible.

The Computrad WANAudit will provide :-

A review of your current environment, traffic, applications and congestion.
A performance upgrade roadmap.
Recommendations for performance and bandwidth.
Solution recommendations from best of breed vendors.

During the Computrad WANAudit, we monitor the traffic flow based upon application level (layer 7) and not just bits and bytes (layer 3) between your remote locations and prepare a detailed report. Our experts will assist you in identifying areas for immediate improvement and advise you on policies and systems to get the most from your existing network bandwidth.

If you are typical of most organisations, time, resources, expertise and costs required to manage the process internally are overwhelming. You need to understand what is happening to your WAN without the costs of managing the process in-house.

The Computrad WANAudit will provide more than just sell a simple solution or tell you to add more bandwidth. We provide capacity-planning recommendations and managed BCAD (Business Critical Application Delivery) services that guarantees application performance with SLA’s.

This BCAD is a unique service and currently no other organisation has the expertise to provide this.