#application awareness

No business whether big or small can survive without network protection. It is important to understand that your business network and applications are highly vulnerable to attacks by hackers and other malicious elements. If you don’t fortify your business against such miscreants, your business can go for a toss anytime. Whether it is your business’ financial data, applications or computer network, everything needs a fool proof security cover.

 Viruses and malware can crash your system, if appropriate steps are not taken for network protection on time. Managed Security Service Providers provide complete network protection ensuring that both your business and network are in the best of health.

 Application visibility and control is a crucial part of this process and aims to safeguard your business from malware that can enter your system through thousands of applications that are used by employees and other people who are part of your network. Another vulnerable area that needs attention is use of social networking apps like Facebook and instant messenger apps. With application control, no user can use these apps without permission of admin. It definitely enhances productivity when employees are not allowed to while away their time at work.

 Businesses need to have application control policies in place to ensure application security. For this, they must outsource their network security job to MSSP who provide complete coverage for thousands of applications that are used on a daily basis. With application visibility and control, everything related to usage of computer applications become transparent. There is 100% application visibility, which means you can easily know which applications are in use and by whom. This prevents network threats associated with applications at the network itself.

 Applications are categorized in various groups depending on the level of risk involved in using them, their features, technology and other parameters that further provides granular controls. Application control is also done based on job roles of users. Application security policies and mechanism monitors, tracks and blocks business applications depending on whether they fall under safe or dangerous perimeter.

 The objective and benefits of application visibility, application control and application awareness:

• Ensures business critical applications are up and running at all times

• Blocks applications  that don’t serve any business purpose like social networking applications

• Helps in optimizing use of bandwidth thus improving network performance

• Reduces the need to update application policies manually when new applications are added

• Prevents confidential business data going in wrong hands

• Creates synchronized network logs to help adjust network settings, if need be

• Makes reports with details of application usage and time

• Helps in strengthening network policies

• Helps in managing the network

• Troubleshooting network and application issues and resolving issues speedily

• Improves user experience and performance

• Reduces downtime and operating costs

In the past the solutions available for monitoring application performance and a Service Level Agreement (SLA) have been incredibly complex and also incredibly costly.  Not all too long ago software agents would need to be integrated and/or hardware probes would need to be inserted into every application server in order to gain any level of visibility.

 Thanks to recent developments, this is no longer the case.  Now you have the ability to deliver a commitment level of an application service because there are solutions which allow enterprises and communication service providers to easily gain application visibility and control.

  Why Application Visibility Matters More Today Than Ever Before

The number of enterprises which are hosting their applications outside of their local networks and in the cloud are growing by the day.  This means that communications service providers are under the constant strain of trying to maintain access and the performance of these off-site apps. Even with SLAs and the use of other performance monitoring tools, many enterprise customers will still complain that the application quality is unreliable.

 This is why application awareness and visibility matters so much to communication service providers.  This means being able to provide enterprise customers with the ability to closely monitor the performance of their own business critical applications right down to a single user.  At the end of the day, enterprise customers are empowered with valuable and insightful information about their applications.

  Choosing The Right Application Visibility Solutions

The goal of every application visibility solution should be to provide enterprises and managed service providers with clear visibility of each and ever network transaction and application.  The solution should be able to give you an understanding of how well the cloud data centers and applications you use are handling an enterprise's workloads and how well it is supporting user productivity.

 ·       The solution should provide users with granular visibility.  The solution should provide granular visibility per user, application, endpoint, SLA and URL.

·       The solution should provide real-time reporting.  Users should be provided with up to the second analytical data about their applications and network.

·       The solution should allow you to track important networks.  Users must be able to follow top applications, most popular endpoints, access utilization, and other metrics which may be important to you.

·       The solution must allow for continuous SLA performance measuring.

·       The solution must allow you to customize usage reports so that each report provides users with relevant information.

·       The solution should automatically create and distribute reports.  Relevant audiences should be able to receive reports on a regular basis.

Each and every day businesses like yours rely heavily on secure and dependable information delivery.  But to ensure outstanding application performance across your enterprise, you must be able to identify issues and resolve problems before they can have a noticeable impact on data security and the user experience.

The problem with the distributed networks of today is that they are so complex that they can actually obscure your ability to view performance problems.  Unlike ten years ago, it is no longer so easy to tell if an application is slow because of relocated servers, bandwidth congestion, traffic or a network attack.

Common Issues Businesses Are Unable To Diagnose

Businesses must be able to deliver critical data to users quickly and reliably.  For example, even a short amount of website or email downtime can result in diminished customer service, interruptions in your supply chance, and a loss of business.

Some of the most common issues which outdated monitoring tools may not be alerting you to include:

·         That recreational traffic is slowing your applications (this includes P2P downloads, instant messaging, web browsing, Internet radio, etc.)

·         That your network is suffering form ongoing security issues involving DDoS attacks and malware

·         That converged video, voice and messaging applications are causing applications to become sluggish or inoperable

Gaining Application Visibility And Control

In order to identify the cause or causes behind your performance issues, you will need in-depth and insightful information about your applications, such as:

·         Service levels

·         Performance metrics

·         Response times

While there are network management products on the market today, many do not provide the level of detail an enterprise needs to take action.

You need to have total application visibility and control, and today there are a handful of vendors which offer actionable application delivery.  Businesses who use these tools are able to:

·         View all applications and users, and how they behave on the network

·         Speed up mission-critical applications, SSL, streaming video and other enterprise traffic

·         Protect your organization against performance degradation, data leaks and malware

·         Leave users with a productive, efficient and reliable end-to-end user experience

Through the use of these tools, IT mangers should be able to discover all network traffic running across the WAN.  By being able to do so, you will then be able to identify application traffic and know how certain activities affect network resources.

Another benefit is that these tools allow you to monitor all aspects of your applications.  You can monitor things such as response times, bandwidth consumption, and how well applications are performing.  Organizations can manage their bandwidth allocation all over the WAN and Internet while also being able to block malicious traffic.