Governments Cut Costs and Boost Connection Speeds by Optimizing Networks

In Oakland County, Mich., there’s no question that county workers depend more than ever on their smartphones and tablets.

CIO Phil Bertolini says the county manages the increased traffic over its wireless network with BlueCoat PacketShaper devices. “We’ve found that if we restrict traffic right at the gate, we have more control over the network,” he says. “PacketShaper lets us prioritize the traffic. For example, video has a higher priority than a simple data transfer.”

Over the past several years, Oakland County has become a cloud network provider for many surrounding municipalities. As the number of government customers expands, Bertolini sees a time when he’ll deploy WAN optimization tools.

“I think we’ll use WAN optimization on our higher latency loads,” the CIO says. “For now, we have high-speed connections that don’t require that we use caching or compression to deliver our applications.”

Bob Laliberte, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group, says more IT organizations must factor in mobility as they move forward with their bandwidth management strategies.

“As workplaces become more mobile, IT managers will be asking many of the same questions as before, such as ‘How can we optimize the network and reduce operational costs?’” Laliberte says. “Only during this era, we will also have to look at applications people are running on their smartphones and tablets.”

Bandwidth Management: Can It Really Save $1 Million?

Rod Franklin, network manager for the Arizona Judicial Information Network, says the Cisco Systems WAAS appliances the agency runs can handle notebooks, but he hasn’t yet looked into the WAAS tools for smartphones or tablets.

“Most of our smartphones and tablets run over a Citrix VDI connection, and we do use some of the compression features in Citrix XenMobile,” says Franklin, who runs the AJIN for the judicial branch of state government.

Across the core network, Cisco WAAS offers some important benefits. For example, it enables AJIN to deliver training video files to remote devices at the courts around the states during off hours so users can access the videos during the day.

“We run on average about 1.5 times more data in 24 hours than we could without WAAS,” Franklin says. “Updates would not happen because of bandwidth constraints,” he says, adding that because the majority of the agency’s links are T1 speeds, they would need to double each in order to handle the same traffic they handle today.

Franklin estimates annual cost savings of $1 million from using Cisco WAAS.