Enterprises can be bandwidth worry-free this ICC Cricket World Cup 2015

NEW DELHI, INDIA: The combination of BYOD, high-definition games, videos, movies have raised serious concerns among enterprises about the exponential increase in bandwidth usage. With the ongoing ICC Cricket World Cup 2015, enterprises will be facing a severe bandwidth choke, as the employees will be prompted to watch the Cricket online while they are at work, and also engage in a lot of social media activities around it. This is set to be a perfect recipe for the death of the network in an enterprise.

In an interview with Rashi Varshney, Sridhar Iyengar, Vice President – Product Management, ManageEngine spoke about how enterprises can be bandwidth worry-free in this Cricket World Cup. Read on…

Edited Excepts

With Cricket World Cup happening, followed by IPL, what are some of the bandwidth related challenges enterprises are facing? And how does it impact their business?

Cricket has always garnered a lot of attention in India, with the recent match against arch rivals Pakistan, in the ongoing ICC Cricket World Cup 2015 commanding an audience of over one billion. To put that into perspective, Super Bowl XLIX in the U.S., on February 2nd, attracted just about 114.4 million people.

Corporate businesses are not immune to the pull of the World Cup. Employees are guilty of streaming matches during working hours, putting a lot of strain on the network bandwidth and adversely affecting the performance of critical business-enabling apps. For example, the sales team might need to access the CRM application to complete an important deal, but the heavy load on the network during cricket season will result in downtime for the app.

Security is another pressing concern, as scammers use world cup-related videos and news to lead unsuspecting users to sites in an attempt to distribute malware.

With the eight season of the IPL (Indian Premier League) following closely on the heels of the world cup, there seems to be no respite for the IT team.

How is the market for bandwidth monitoring and mapping in India? What products are available in the market for bandwidth monitoring and mapping?

The International Telecommunication Union reports that an entry-level broadband plan in India accounts for 5.5% of the per capita income as opposed to 0.5-0.8% of per capita income in countries like U.S. or the U.K. With bandwidth being a premium in India, IT directors and managers are struggling to counter the potentially enormous load on corporate networks and avoid costly downtime of applications and software. It is especially true for Industry verticals such as banking and financial services, telecom, and e-commerce. This scenario calls out for products that help monitor the network and allocate bandwidth on priority basis for applications.

Netflow Analyzer from ManageEngine is one such product that is designed to monitor real-time network bandwidth consumption by individual applications across different IP addresses and devices (desktop and mobile devices). It helps you prioritize network traffic by setting QoS (Quality of Service) and reconfigure bandwidth (network traffic shaping) to ensure high uptime for business critical applications. Also, it allows you to identify bandwidth bottlenecks to facilitate swifter troubleshooting of network incidents, set alerts when bandwidth utilization exceeds pre-define threshold settings, and track abnormal spikes in the traffic pattern to identify and neutralize security threats.

Network Defender Plus is a flow-based network behaviour anomaly detection software that analyzes packet flows to detect malicious traffic hitting the network, and Network Configuration Manager is a web–based, multi vendor network change, configuration and compliance management (NCCCM) solution for switches, routers, firewalls and other network devices

How is the product adoption rate in India so far?

At ManageEngine, Netflow Analyzer adoption has been growing at a steady 30-40 percent for the last five years with India ranking number two on the list of countries from which users have downloaded our product. In fact, some of the top system integrators in the country use our software.

What is “shadow IT” and how does it impact companies? How it is in India?

Shadow IT refers to the IT solutions used by organisations without the consent of their central IT teams.  The flexibility provided by the cloud has only served to fuel the rise of shadow IT in the workplace. According to a research from McAfee, 80 percent of employees confessed to using unapproved SaaS applications at work.

Traditionally, shadow IT has not been viewed favourably by most organisations due to issues such as control, compatibility, compliance, security, and reliability. But, shadow IT is not always detrimental to the organization. In fact, if used judiciously, it can be an effective source of innovation in the workplace.

For example, if you want to test a prototype application, it is much easier, faster, and cost effective to rent cloud servers than to ask the IT team to invest in dedicated servers. Even downloading apps such as WhatsApp on their corporate tablets and mobiles can facilitate better communication on the go across business.

How unique is India market and how ManageEngine is approaching it?

India is a price-conscious country and the licensed software business has traditionally been tough here due to pirated versions, cracks, and license abuse. But we see a transformation happening in the ecosystem with lots of startups and new-age IT managers taking licensed software seriously.

ManageEngine's approach to reaching out to this new breed is to spend less on advertising and give away a lot of free tools, which IT teams can put to use right away. Our belief is that once they start using the software for a year or so, they will have enough data to convince the upper management of the software's value, thus making the purchase a simple process. The free editions of our solutions handle 10 interfaces for Netflow Analyzer, 5 devices for Network Configuration Manager, and 25 devices for OpManager.