Multi WAN Traffic Shaping, How Does It Work?

Most organizations have to contend with employees who like nothing more than wasting time on social media. Streaming videos in YouTube and Facebook are a personal favorite but since they do it mostly during breaks, most businesses turn a blind eye to them. However, they may be sucking up all the bandwidth which your productive employees need to complete important projects resulting in delays and more work after hours.

If you count yourself as one of those frustrated business owners, then the best thing you can do is incorporate Multi Wan traffic shaping  into your in-house network.

What is Multi WAN Traffic Shaping?

Multi WAN Traffic Shaping refers to a process that most companies utilize to optimize the speed of their network. This basically allows them to allocate bandwidth to certain specific business centric applications that require the internet the most.

The technique will allow network administrators to redirect bandwidth to appropriate apps and decrease it from those that are not typically used or are harmful for productivity. In other words, critical tasks will not come to a standstill just because your employees don’t have access to appropriate amounts of bandwidth.

The bandwidth is assigned by basing it on an IP address, application, protocol, network or port after the network administrator determines who in your company requires the most bandwidth and who can get by with less or mediocre amounts.  This will be done after an analysis of the type of traffic that comes through via throttling, queuing or allocation. These are as follows:

Throttling – A particular kind of traffic that comes through is decreased by the network administrator and this will be based on the available packets on the interface within a specific period of time.

Queuing – During this technique the network administrator allocates traffic in separate queues and they empty it in order of relevance or need.

Allocation – As the name implies, the administrator assigns or allocates a certain amount of bandwidth to one type of traffic and another set to different types of traffic. This eliminates chances of downtime and accelerates productivity.

Then there is dynamic shaping which allows administrators to actually change how the different Multi WAN Traffic Shaping methods are utilized. This information is extracted when the admin acquires a real time report of the traffic that is moving throughout his website which tells him what the traffic flow is like. By analyzing the report he can adjust the traffic to fit the needs of the company either manually or through a device that follows the general rules that have been laid out by the administrator of the network.

If your business is suffering because of a loss in productivity then chances are your employees are wasting their time on social media and online videos. Besides allowing you to pinch off bandwidth where it is not needed or is being exploited, you can shape it according to the needs of business critical applications and save your business money at the same time.