AppNeta

It’s a pretty normal scene in offices across the globe – an employee has some down time on their hands, so they head on over to social media sites such as Facebook. Instead of seeing a newsfeed full of status updates from their closest friends and family members, the employee is greeted with a bold “access denied” message.

While the use of content filtering software has been a standard way to stop employees from slacking off online, it might not be the best possible approach. Instead, using network traffic analysis solutions to monitor flow allows you to keep tabs on what sites your employees are actually visiting in their spare time.

Knowing what hosts are using all of your network’s traffic is important anywhere, but it’s even more important at large enterprise companies. With so many employees, the battle for bandwidth is constant, and you need to assess against which hosts to set rules and regulations. While it’s a fair to assume that your employees might be spending more time on Facebook than they should, what if it’s not the main culprit of network traffic theft? Maybe in reality, employees are willing away the hours on Match.com or news sites such as CNN.com.

Flow lets you monitor which sites employees frequent throughout the day and shows you how much of the pipe those sites or applications are using. Flow also lets you validate bandwidth usage, which ultimately results in cost savings.

If you’re researching flow services, consider a solution that:

1. Classifies traffic into easy-to-understand options, such as traffic by application, QoS or category … providing much more granularity than traditional NetFlow tools.
2. Easily identifies the devices and the destinations consuming bandwidth, including BYOD devices.
3. Provides visibility into the traffic usage by QoS and total bandwidth used by each queue as well.
4. Deploys easily on any network regardless of the design or the hardware capabilities.
   • For example, our FlowView solution  does not require flow-enabled devices onsite. Instead, it generates its own flow. 

Flow that classifies traffic

You wouldn’t spend lots of money to replace your car’s entire engine without first lifting the hood to figure out what specifically is causing the malfunction, so why would you do the same with web traffic? Often times, when issues are being experienced, additional bandwidth is added without finding out what is causing the slowdown. Flow provides the eyes into the pipe to see if additional bandwidth is even needed. Instead of spending money on content filtering services that may or may not block the sites that are using all of your network traffic, consider looking at flow solutions that will give the insight into the actual hosts that our filling your pipe.

How does your organization monitor and manage traffic on the network?