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The Internet is increasingly present in business activities, regardless of segment or size. There is a unique sense of convergence for electronic platforms and the internet offers the means of communication that makes these interconnections possible. It is a no-go road, run by several companies for many years.
The offer of corporate services over the Internet has been increasing in recent years, much of it driven by the service model, whether SaaS (Software as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and the like. This is not just a move of startups since many mature companies, global leaders in their segments, are also seeking to make their offers more flexible.
The concept of cloud computing, highly important for the operating these new models, has led to many other facilities for people and companies, serving the most varied needs, from backup to food market place and online orders.
All these news, however, can only be accessed through the internet. This considerably increases the reliance on resources in organizations. In view of this, maintaining the availability and optimization of the internet becomes a priority for many companies.
In other words, it pays $ 2,000 per month for a 10Mbit circuit and $ 20.00 for an online movie or backup service that can quickly consume the entire contracted bandwidth. Therefore, analyzing the perspective of companies, having band prioritization mechanisms and download limitation is fundamental to ensure the rational use of the internet, directed to the end business activities.
In this article, we will discuss two concepts that can be applied as strategy in small, medium and large companies for segmentation, prioritization and bandwidth limitation, as well as downloads within the concept of web proxy, understanding that HTTP traffic is a major bandwidth-consuming villain.
Band Prioritization
Prioritizing the band means ensuring sufficient connectivity resources for some addresses, services, or applications. Within the context of a proxy web, band prioritization aims to ensure the differentiation of consumption in the most varied sites and applications based on the HTTP protocol.
Through this feature, which many solutions offer in an integrated way to the web proxy, you can establish criteria where websites totally related to day to day work take precedence over others.
It is also possible to flexibilize based on the access profile of the users, allowing strategic sectors, regardless of the site or web application accessed, to have speed privileges over others. It may also be interesting that the prioritization is based on schedules of lower or higher demand.
Band prioritization consists of processing in a differentiated way the information that crosses the proxy, according to the rules created. This is extremely important for the present day, since the band used by companies is not unlimited, and the work must be prioritized.
There are many complaints from business users about slow access, either to a bank, or to some portal often used for business purposes. This is a common problem and directly affects the productivity of employees as a whole. Activities that could be carried out in a few minutes are delayed due to the speed of access compromised by other access that, in many cases, does not concern the interest of the company.
This is largely due to the lack of application of access policies in companies, causing the resources of the internet to be played without any criteria. A good policy safeguards the interests of the company and ensures the reservation of resources in an appropriate way to the business applications.
Through integrated web control to the web proxy, regardless of access policies, it is guaranteed that applications or websites fundamental to the work of the company are reserved. In these cases, the one that does not have priority will have the speed reduced, or the access prohibited.
This is a very important measure to be applied by IT specialists and managers to rationalize resources more and more without requiring a bandwidth increase, and therefore a fixed cost. Even in these cases, increasing bandwidth is not a solution. On the contrary, bandwidth will only allow non-work activities to be done with greater comfort (speed).
Limits on downloads
Another important point to be considered in a bandwidth savings structure within companies is the limitation of downloads performed, especially during business hours, which tends to directly affect a larger number of people.
The download limitation in this case is not applied to slowing down; this can be treated as previously exposed. On the other hand, this feature allows you to create rules based on the size of the files and contents downloaded from the internet.
In this way, either it is possible to define a global limit size of downloads or create more accurate access profiles that defend the interests of the company; thus, they can be applied by users, groups, schedules, websites and others.
An example would be set at business hours, as the maximum allowed download are files that do not exceed 20Mb. However, certain websites and certain users have unrestricted access, even during business hours. This ensures business interest and productivity is not affected by the slowness of the internet.
It is important to understand that a good part of the users in the companies download or access content that consumes band, without knowing the damages that this attitude can bring to the business. For this reason, it is highly recommended the structuring and dissemination of campaigns and information focused on the awareness of employees.
Although these concepts can (and are recommended to) be applied outside the web proxy, in this article we approach only information about how to improve the service and user perception of the internet in a corporate environment, without necessarily involving investments in links.
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