Security providerGroup 4 Securicor(G4S) is set to save
£70,000 a year in additional bandwidth costs with an upgrade that
allows it to allocate existing network capacity to critical
applications more quickly.
G4S's network, which incurs £280,000 a year in bandwidth costs,
links 42 sites equipped with more than 1,000 PCs. It runs critical
applications, such as real-time armoured-vehicle monitoring and
real-time monitoring of alarms.
Prior to the upgrade, users were experiencing delays in sending
data across the network because of the high number of applications
running on the network and the limited bandwidth available, said
Vincent Girardin, IT director at G4S.
The company installed hardware from
Ipanema, costing £42,000, to monitor the flow of traffic over
the network so that the correct amount of bandwidth could be
allocated from less important applications to more critical
ones.
The biggest challenge was deciding what applications should take
priority. Between 2002 and 2007, the criticality of network
applications was reviewed, resulting in 15 classes covering all the
networked applications.
"We do not often modify the criticality of our applications, but
we often have to prioritise certain end-users," said Girardin.