"How does network congestion impact productivity?"

Web Services: Pump Up the Volume

Web services is one of the hottest topics in the IT business. This new distributed computing model enables applications to be deployed as services that can be accessed by anyone, inside or outside of the enterprise. This creates new opportunities to increase revenue and establish tighter relationships with customers and business partners, but it also creates some new challenges for network managers.

Most IT managers have focused on the potential benefits of Web services, while largely overlooking the impact on enterprise networks and the resulting cost of upgrades that may be needed. A basic understanding of Web services is needed in order to understand its impact on enterprise networks, particularly WANs.

The Web services framework is a set of industry-standard protocols, and message formats that enable developers to build applications that provide services to other applications across the Web. Web services are self-contained, self-defining applications. These services can range from simple stock quotes or weather forecasts to complex business processes, and multiple services can be loosely coupled to build more complex services. Unlike the original Web model, Web services enable automated program-to-program communications and not just human access to server-based content.

The goal of Web services is to enable any authorized user to access any available service. To meet this objective, the Web services initiative has standardized three sets of functions:

standard transport and messaging protocols;
directory services; and
standard service-description language.
The most basic requirement is to enable communications between Web services and service requesters. The Web services messaging protocols are designed to be independent of the underlying transport protocols, but, as a practical matter, most implementations use the Web’s HTTP protocol. From a network point-of-view, Web services looks like ordinary Web traffic.

Network congestion can have a significant impact on productivity. One of my suppliers has its major operation in Norway. As a result, they do system maintenance between 2pm and 4 pm Central time USA. During this time, the US operation is effectively down and unable to open files or upload information into the system. They loose this 2 hour time frame. I have recommended that they obtain a server and have an emulation program down loaded on the server and in this way avoid loosing these two hours on a daily basis.

The best way to protect your LAN is to have both internal and external fire walls. This way if you have people using laptops which leave the building on a daily basis, the internal firewall prevents virus and other attacks from the inside while the external firewall does so from outside attacks. The internal firewall is controlled by both pass word and 32 bit encryption as well as key word search which signals the IT department if one of the machines has been used to vist porn sights or other inappropriate sites. Since all of the machines are company property there are strict usage rules. Violation of these rules can result in dismissal or loss of privelages or other disciplinary actions. Out side computers can be used in the facility but we have a special LAN which is effectively outside of our primary systems so that their can be no accidental infaction.