Top 4 Use Cases of Application Visibility and Control (AVC)

Published Date

September 3, 2017

Read

4 minutes

Written By

Yogesh Purohit

In today’s world when we seek for IoT, IoE, cloud computing, IaaS and various other things, being aware of application is a necessity. When we consider a network system to be deployed for home, enterprise or on a more global level as cloud services, one needs awareness about applications, traffic traveling across and user preferences. Awareness about the network and application visibility, its need, use cases and its future are few things going through everyone’s mind involved in the Networking ecosystem. An application visible network is more beneficial than non-visible or traditional network. It is just like in a locality, a person aware of the surroundings and places nearby has the advantage to figure out day to day needs and also during an emergency.

Application visible networking has a huge set of benefits with lesser handicaps to be counted. The capabilities of application visibility in the network vary widely, ranging from basic application statistics to full data decoding and behavior modeling.

Here are Top 4 Use Cases of Application Visibility and Control (AVC):

#1 Prevention of Traffic Congestion:

The Internet and WAN access have a bottleneck of traffic congestion and it is a bit difficult to pinpoint the root cause. But using the capability of application visibility and control one can not only identify its root cause but also can prevent and protect the network from it. It is used in different solutions across various network topologies as even in the case of WAN optimization. In QoS it is used for improving the quality of service based on an application which is the prime requirement.

#2 Network Security:

Firewall for application specific filtering is a common use case which is used for many decades. But with time, identification of applications has evolved to be more accurate with lesser latency. It is very crucial for network’s security to identify ever evolving threats and protect the network in bare minimum time. The more information about the traffic, the better protection one may achieve, so more application visibility the better control of traffic.

#3 Flexible and efficient Storage Systems:

With an increase in data usage, storage of data and its secure and quick access is the key concern for all. In current times, we store increasing amount of data of varied types and importances, which is to be accessed and used by multiple applications for different purposes. Independent storage systems are inflexible, inefficient and also expensive. The optimized way to deal with this issue is to have an application visible storage systems. The technology is not that new, but growing demand for its benefits has made it more popular in recent times. With more usage of cloud services for storage, it has become a necessity.

#4 Better user Experience and personalization:

Once being aware of application stream, same can be used in modeling the behavior of the incoming traffic for better quality performance to the user. Application visibility is used to enhance customer engagement by interactive campaigns and targeted experiences. Being aware of user and his network usage gives an edge to the service provider.

For identifying the application and its control one needs a right inspection of the traffic. Any traffic traversing through the system needs a thorough packet inspection wherein effective DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) is needed. In the recent times, DPI has formed the crux for secure networks, and being accurate with least time is utmost high priority characteristic required from DPI. There are various algorithms and libraries to enhance speedy packet inspection. Even hardware supported packet inspection is used to get better results in best time.

Application visibility and control are requirements and DPI forms the tool engine to fulfill this requirement for today’s networking world. As today’s network is growing over cloud and services over cloud infrastructure, one can easily conclude the pivotal role of application visibility and control in future as well so fast and accurate application visibility and control is the ‘need of hour’.