Network customers have always bought networks for one and only one reason: to run their applications over them.  Yet for most of that time, those networks have been largely oblivious to the composition of the network traffic they carried.  Traditional network tools could tell you whether your network was having a lot of errors, or whether a given link or interface was congested, but they couldn't tell you what was congesting your network, beyond the limited granularity of a few well-known ports.  Finding out that you've got a lot of HTTP or HTTPS is not very helpful in finding out whether you're swamped by personal traffic that needs to be controlled, or by legitimate business traffic that requires an increase in effective bandwidth.

WANs are now becoming more Intelligent, and new managed services based on Cisco's Intelligent WAN (IWAN) solutions are now available.  Vodafone's new OPR Visibility service offerings let their subscribers:

• Identify more than 1,000 commonly used applications based on their protocol signatures.
• Define more than 100 additional custom protocols to be recognized on their network.
• Report and graphically visualize traffic volumes for all of these applications [An Example to Track QoS Utilization Below].

• Report and graphically visualize performance metrics for applications that are important to their business, whether these are voice or video based media applications, or TCP-based transactional applications [An Example Below].

• Prioritize important applications, and limit bandwidth consumption by less important or personal use applications (or block them altogether) using per-application Quality of Service (QoS) policies

So now, when a phone and tablet vendor comes out with a new OS release, and every app vendor follows with new versions to support it, your network doesn't have to get swamped.  You can simply create a policy that gives their download website a maximum amount of bandwidth on your WAN connections -say, 10% -that lets your employees and customers update their devices, but prevents those updates from interfering with your business traffic.

All of this is delivered by Cisco Application Experience ("AX") routers, in combination with portal software from InfoVista, integrated into Vodafone's network. InfoVista was the first multi-tenant portal to complete Cisco's Interoperability Verification Test for Application Visibility and Control. It's done simply and efficiently, without additional appliances, software agents, or virtual machines. It's simply the Cisco Intelligent WAN.

So -isn't it time you found out what's in your network -and DO something about it? Take the first step today and check out what Vodafone Application Visibility and Control can do for your business.