In today’s uncertain economic climate we are left trying to figure out how best we can manage our resources till we are sure of a rebound from this global financial crisis. Every small saving is a step towards saving our future growth. Budgets are getting slashed, spending tightened and every IT administrator is scrambling to reduce their IT expenditure. A huge dent on IT budgets is internet bandwidth costs and there is never enough amount of bandwidth for an enterprise. In such tough economic scenario maximizing our resources is the key to sustaining ourselves; IT Administrators can do so by having better control on bandwidth usage. Being aware of how the bandwidth is being utilized and by eliminating any non-business usage or high bandwidth intensive applications, IT administrators can go a long way in reducing their bandwidth costs.
For example in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), bandwidth charges are significantly higher and as shown below, even a little judicious usage of bandwidth can lead to considerable savings.
- Average cost of Bandwidth in KSA ~ $40 per GB
- Average number of Business Days per month = 25 Days
- Worst case Scenario:
If 1 GB of Bandwidth is saved per day, then 25 GB is saved per month.
Bandwidth Cost Savings: 25 GB × $ 40 = $1000 per month.
These savings could potentially be much higher when deployed in real life environments. Now you must be thinking how do we implement this? Let me assume you already have an IT infrastructure in place with Firewalls included in your network. Firewall Analyzer is a solution that lets you figure out the bandwidth usage patterns in your network as a result you can effectively make changes to your IT policies to ensure judicial usage of bandwidth thereby reducing bandwidth charges.
When deployed, Firewall Analyzer can generate reports to display the top websites that are accessed by the network. Also it displays the top hosts/users/protocols that use the bandwidth most. This enables Network Administrators to determine any rogue site which is causing a bandwidth hog or any user who maybe using the bandwidth for non-business use and thereby gives control over the usage. This information can enable a network administrator to block any unwanted websites from their network which are taking up excessive bandwidth. Therefore you can effectively control your bandwidth usage which automatically translates into cost savings.
Here‘s a case study that illustrates how Firewall Analyzer helped Professional Engineers Ontario, Canada gain control of their Bandwidth usage. This provides a real life example of the challenges faced by the organization and how effectively their bandwidth usage was controlled on implementing Firewall Analyzer. More info about ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer can be found at http://www.fwanalyzer.com.
