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For government, an optimised WAN means optimised service

By Brandon Rochat, Territory Sales Manager, South Africa, Exinda Networks.


Johannesburg, 11 Oct 2012
Brandon Rochat, Territory Sales Manager, South and sub-Saharan Africa, Exinda Networks.
Brandon Rochat, Territory Sales Manager, South and sub-Saharan Africa, Exinda Networks.

Government has accepted the responsibility of delivering a better life for all. To accomplish this, it needs to invest time, expertise and funds in various areas of South African society, be it the availability of clean water, electricity, housing, healthcare, infrastructure, and so forth. Part of its mandate is to deliver services to the public through its national and local offices, which are all connected on a wide-area network (WAN), says Brandon Rochat, Territory Sales Manager, South Africa, Exinda Networks.

The performance of this WAN plays a tremendous role in empowering local and national government employees to do their jobs efficiently, at a level of productivity that supports the ultimate goals of government. When the WAN underperforms, as it often does, workers are prevented from completing their daily tasks, which results in frustrated workers and an angry public, all because "the network is slow".

There are tens of thousands of endpoints on the WAN, some in metropolitan areas with good infrastructure, but many in remote areas with poor connectivity, all sending and receiving information via official and unofficial applications.

Add to this the proliferation of Internet-based applications everybody uses and you add more complexity, resulting in an inefficient network. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that nobody has the tools necessary to identify what is causing the problem.

The first step in addressing this issue is to acknowledge that, if left unmanaged, slowness or inefficiency of the network is a given. To deal with this, those tasked with managing the network need to implement a management layer that will be able to understand and report on what is consuming network resources.

This allows them to gain visibility into what is actually on the network. The fact is, few network managers actually know what data is on their network.

Once you have visibility, you are able to make intelligent decisions as to what users, applications and sites are consuming your bandwidth. This allows you to define policies and processes governing the use of the network, ensuring management is able to regain control.

Finally, once you have visibility and control of the network, it's possible to use technology to optimise the availability of critical applications. It's not necessary to make Facebook faster, for example, but you want your financial and HR applications to deliver fast responses to user requests.

When done correctly, network optimisation allows organisations to deliver application assurance to users. This means government managers can insist on the efficient performance of critical applications at all times. In case of a problem, the technical team is automatically advised as to what is causing a bottleneck or backlog, enabling them to start remedying the situation before the users have time to complain.

WAN optimisation is not about technology, it's about productivity and working efficiently to deliver an effective public service. With an efficient information infrastructure in place, local and national government departments are able to function at peak capacity, each playing their part in delivering a better life for all.

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Exinda

Exinda is a proven global supplier of next-generation WAN optimisation and application performance assurance products. The company has helped more than 2 500 organisations in over 80 countries worldwide improve the end-user experience, manage application performance, manage congestion over the WAN, and reduce network operating costs for the IT executive. For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com.

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