Business Objective and Benefits: To optimise bandwidth usage required for a web based conferencing solution whilst avoiding detrimental impact on other network users.

Products and Services used: Check Point Floodgate and Presence Professional Services.

This rapidly expanding data integration and migration company develops technologies that are used in a large number of blue-chip corporations around the world. The company has offices in the UK and the USA. To minimise the need for travel between locations the company were early adopters of web-based conferencing. This was extremely successful but it had an unforeseen side-effect.

It was evident that whenever the conferencing system was operational the other services sharing the connection to the Internet from the UK  headquarters became very slow. The options available were to provide separate dedicated connectivity for the conferencing system, to upgrade the existing link to give adequate bandwidth for all the services or to manage the bandwidth more effectively.

Presence Professional Services reviewed the infrastructure and analysed the traffic using the connection, considered the costs and benefits of each approach and reported the findings to the company. The principal finding was that the conferencing system would soak-up as much bandwidth as was available when in operation; this ruled out the idea of a simple upgrade.

The alternatives were then a dedicated line or a managed connection. The economics of the situation were straightforward; a dedicated connection would be much more costly but would a managed service work? Fortunately there was no problem satisfying that question using the proven FloodGate bandwidth management system from Check Point.

The FloodGate software allocates sufficient bandwidth for the conferencing application when it is operational but preserves adequate bandwidth for other critical applications to enable their use with good levels of performance and responsiveness. Applications and services which are not run in real time or are largely insensitive to connection performance, such as email, are “throttled back” when conferencing is active.

As part of this development Presence also provides technical support for the Check Point system and the Nokia appliance on which it runs.

The outcome is that the company now has a very important communications tool available to its headquarters team which utilises connection bandwith in the most cost-effective manner and avoids a detrimental impact on other network users.