The cloud officially hit the tipping point last year, when more than half of all enterprises said a cloud-based deployment was their first choice for new business applications. Companies are increasingly choosing the cloud for reasons that vary from increased flexibility, mobility and collaboration to real-time, offsite backup and recovery, automatic updates and decreased capital expenditures. But, as enterprises move more workloads to the cloud, it’s not without challenges.

IT departments struggle to support the increase in users, devices, apps and locations while also tasked with lowering network operating costs and controlling rising bandwidth demands. Systems administrators are lacking the control they need in a cloud environment to efficiently manage network resources while having the visibility they need to fix issues as they arise and provide a seamless end user experience.

When migrating critical applications to the cloud, few organizations can confidently say they have enough visibility and control to ensure users receive a fast, responsive, optimized experience at all times, across all applications, from all locations. Enter traffic-shaping.  Traffic shaping reduces the impact of heavy traffic, whether from users or machines, to optimize or guarantee performance, improve latency, and increase usable bandwidth for some kinds of packets by delaying other kinds. The more critical the cloud application, the more important traffic shaping is for:

• Optimizing performance: Anyone who has been on a less-than-optimal Skype call knows how frustrating it can be. Congested network links and poorly optimized network connections result in huge productivity hits to the business, as users spend more time waiting for apps to respond than getting business done.
• Enforcing appropriate use: One significant factor behind poor performance is a result of critical applications fighting for bandwidth against non-business-sanctioned apps. If users are on YouTube, Facebook, Pandora, Dropbox and other bandwidth-hogging apps, critical app performance will suffer.
• Troubleshooting problems: Once an application moves to the cloud, IT no longer has full end-to-end visibility. This means they are at the mercy of the cloud provider, with no way to monitor performance, enforce policies or troubleshoot issues.
• Reducing costs: With network costs rising as fast as demand, it’s no longer possible to simply throw more bandwidth at a performance problem. Organizations need to monitor, measure and prioritize how users, applications, and websites consume network bandwidth, just as they would for on-premises deployments.

Traffic shaping is critical to ensure optimal performance and user experience in the cloud. Exinda Network Orchestrator combines interactive analytics, an intelligent recommendation engine, traffic shaping and WAN optimization to improve Network Managers and Administrators control over:

• Usage: Create policies to manage how network resources are allocated and ensure your business-critical applications are prioritized and optimized while keeping non-critical traffic from becoming a drag on performance.
• Insight: By correlating application data with network information, Network Orchestrator provides complete end-to-end visibility into all application traffic, down to the device level. Not only does it help pinpoint quality issues, but its patent-pending recommendation engine uncovers the root cause and suggests ways to fix network issues and optimize performance.

Your business-critical applications need to perform fast and reliably, and a smooth user experience for your customers and employees is essential for efficiency and productivity. When your network performance suffers so does your business. As a partner of Exinda, Resilient Intelligent Networks are experts in configuring and deploying Exinda Network Orchestrator to provide your IT staff with the tools they need for optimal network performance.