The challenge of bandwidth control in a cloud world
Your applications are moving to the cloud and your internet traffic is growing — making it essential to prioritize business critical apps, like Office 365, over YouTube, live-streaming, and other traffic to ensure a fast user experience and fully realize the benefits of the cloud.
You may try to address these challenges by upgrading bandwidth before deploying Office 365. However, most organizations still face network challenges and user experience suffers, despite increasing bandwidth.
Source: TechValidate and Zscaler. “Challenges with Office 365 Deployment” Survey. Q1 2017.
reported problems related to bandwidth controls.
reported that personal and entertainment traffic is favored over Office 365.
reported they are unable to access business-critical applications including Office 365.
Traditional solutions are not enough
To route traffic locally and police bandwidth, you could deploy next-generation firewalls or UTM appliances in every location. But this approach is expensive, difficult for you to manage, and your user experience still suffers. Appliances simply are not designed for window shaping, and will drop packets and interrupt video streaming during contention.
UTM/Firewall appliance sprawl
- Complex and costly to deploy and manage appliances
- Performance degradation leads to hardware upgrades
- Bandwidth policing drops packets and negatively impacts user experience
- UTM/FW not designed for bandwidth shaping
Zscaler simplifies bandwidth control by moving it to the cloud
It is time to move your security and controls to the cloud. By implementing Zscaler Cloud Firewall and Bandwidth Control, both part of the Zscaler Cloud Security Platform — you can route traffic locally to the internet, provide the same level of protection for all users, across all locations, and enforce bandwidth management policies to prioritize critical business applications over other traffic.
Read the Solution Brief
Transform with Zscaler
Prioritize business-critical applications
- Limit the impact of streaming media, file sharing, and social media on business apps
- Identify bandwidth constraints before they impede the user experience
- Align policies for all users to business needs, with granular rules by application class, location, and time
Better user experience
- Break out traffic locally for faster internet access
- Enable secure access to both business and personal applications
- Leverage window shaping and bandwidth throttling to avoid packet dropping and create a seamless user experience
Reduce costs and simplify IT
- Eliminate the need to purchase, deploy, and manage new hardware
- Reduce MPLS backhaul costs by offloading internet traffic via local breakouts
- Eliminate bottlenecks and WAN latency by enforcing policies in the cloud
- Maintain unmatched security in all locations
Tailor bandwidth policies to align to business needs
With bandwidth control you can create and immediately implement granular policy. Typical bandwidth policies include limiting recreational traffic, such as streaming video, and giving business apps precedence over other traffic. With Zscaler, there are many more parameters you can use to define a policy. Here are a few examples:
1. Prioritize Office 365; guarantee 40%
2. Restrict YouTube streaming to 20%
3. Limit large downloads (such as MSFT 10, OSX updates)
Gain detailed bandwidth visibility
Office 365 now prevails, not YouTube. Before Zscaler, YouTube accounted for this customer’s largest consumption of bandwidth. With easy-to-use Zscaler bandwidth controls, the company was able to reserve 40 percent of its bandwidth specifically for Office 365, while capping YouTube, as shown in this bandwidth report.
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