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“Things to consider before outsourcing your WAN”
By Jeff Parker - 3/15/200

Your carrier is pushing you hard to outsource your wide area network (WAN) to them. The sales pitch sounds simple and compelling. Why spend all of the time and energy managing your WAN when the carrier can do it for you? The purpose of this news brief is to explore the issues that are often overlooked when organizations outsource their WAN. OpenWater Solutions has identified five key areas to consider before outsourcing your WAN.

Application performance:

Why does the network exist in the first place? To allow users to access the key applications that enable users to support the needs of the business. If your job responsibilities revolve around supporting the LAN &/or WAN of your companies network for any length of time, then you most certainly have had the network blamed for a myriad of problems by users of the applications and the applications teams themselves. A large majority of application related performance problems are most evident across the WAN where bandwidth is typically less than 2% of the bandwidth available to LAN based users. Is your carrier now going to start taking calls from end users complaining of poor application performance? Are they actually going to analyze the traffic flows to determine if it's a network, server or application problem?

Capacity Planning:

Capacity planning is one of the key disciplines of ITIL. If you are like me though, ITIL is just a concise breakdown of the tasks you should already be performing as an IT professional. If you run a WAN, then you should have a capacity management process in place. Anyone who has held a capacity management role will tell you that access to data is a key prerequisite of the job. Consider the following key metrics:

95th Percentile: How can you calculate 95th percentile of your WAN traffic if you do not have access to the data? Average utilization: Most performance management software and certainly most of the performance reporting provided by carriers are unable to provide average utilization based upon business hour metrics. It does little good to provide average utilization based upon a 24 hour business day when your locations have an 8am - 5pm business day. Traffic analysis: statistics show that business critical applications typically only account for 14% of your overall WAN traffic, email 20-23%, and over 50% on recreational or non-business productive apps. Most reports provided by carriers show you performance statistics based upon SNMP. This may show you that a WAN link is 80% utilized during the day. Based upon this limited information many companies believe that increasing bandwidth speeds is the answer. This leads to costly incresses that could have been avoided by utilizing performance management tools that utilize Netflow or RMON technologies. Top-N Reporting: Most IT Executives are very interested in seeing daily hotspot style reports showing top offenders or issues that need closer analysis. Let's assume that management wanted daily, weekly and monthly Top-N reports showing latency, packet loss, jitter, avg utilization based on business hours, peak utilization, top traffic consumers, and sites experiencing the largest growth in traffic. Ask yourself how you'd provide this data when you have no access to the actual data. It resides on the servers of your WAN provider.

Carrier Management:

Your second largest recurring cost in IT is your WAN costs and you've just outsourced it to your carrier. The SLA that you've negotiated with your carrier likely has little to no teeth in it. You believe that you're having availability and performance issues on your WAN, but the only data available is from the WAN provider itself and amazingly enough their statistics look fine. This isn't too surprising when you consider that the data being made available to you is typically only based upon SNMP which is being collected on 5 minute intervals. As such a critical component of your network and such a big expenditure, you may want to consider managing the performance of your WAN provider. Many progressive companies are proactively monitoring their WAN utilizing technologies such as ICMP, SNMP (gets & traps), syslogs, IPSLA, Netflow & RMON. IPSLA is especially powerful if you are leveraging MPLS on your WAN.

The common misconception is that you either do it all internally or your outsource the whole thing. There are many additional options to consider. It may be true that you have limited resources in IT and no technical expertise available at your remote sites. Rather than outsourcing the whole enchilada why not tell your WAN provider that you are interested in them providing you with your bandwidth and providing local resources when it comes to deployment and replacement of your WAN equipment at your remotes. This addresses the most critical challenge -- lack of skilled resources at your remote sites -- while still allowing you to retain control of your devices and the configurations running upon them.

BSM / SLM:

Many organizations are investing in Business Service Management and Service Level Management. The key premise behind these two concepts is focusing on the application. Managing networks, servers and applications in silos does not focus on the one key component -- the users experience with the application. In order for a key business application to run it requires many technology contributors. Among these are the LAN, WAN, circuits, web servers, application servers, databases, load balancers, and the application itself to name a few. BSM & SLM both consist of building a service hierarchy of the key components involved.

OpenWater has a client that is managing a key healthcare application in this manner. The application relies upon 7 windows servers, an AS400, 3 server farm switches, 2 routers, a core switch, and 5 individual application components. In order to effectively manage this service hierarchy we needed to manage availability, performance and event based data. Ask yourself how well you'll be able to support your organizations BSM / SLM initiatives when you have no access to WAN statistics!

Self Preservation:

According to research, IT professionals in most organizations are motivated by a challenging job, making a contribution, responsibility, trying new things and job stability. If you are an IT professional in an organization with a WAN, then, according to Gartner Group, you are responsible for the single largest recurring cost, other than people, in your IT organization. If the WAN falls under your responsibility, then you have an outstanding opportunity to make a significant contribution to your organization. Step one may be to outsource the second largest recurring IT cost. It's not a big leap to think that step two may be outsourcing the single largest recurring IT cost.