Moving To Microsoft Cloud? Expect Delays

SYDNEY - Sept. 22, 2016 - PRLog -- These days many businesses are moving in to the cloud, and a huge proportion of those we speak to are migrating to the Microsoft Cloud environment. This is great in terms of reducing IT workload:

- Redundancy – Microsoft Cloud hosts handle redundancy and backups of your data.

- Uptime – Theoretically the uptime of a cloud based service is also increased due to point 1, redundancy.

- Reduced Maintenance – no more need to keep an in-house team of experts to maintain Microsoft products.

However, this does not come without drawbacks. As we have seen in a recent case study where an international business moved from locally hosted Microsoft services such as Exchange and locally stored file stores, to the Microsoft Cloud.

The Result Of Introducing Microsoft OneDrive? - BIG DELAYS ON OTHER SERVICES

As soon as the business moved to Microsoft Cloud, Salesforce. degraded in quality. So what was causing these delays, and was it due to Microsoft Cloud? We took a look at their Internet Link. This business had a 1 Gb/s link that connected 6 main sites worldwide. When we looked at the delays we saw something starteling:

Suddenly Salesforce Web traffic from the Copenhagen link was seeing delays of up to 7 seconds. This became unusable for the staff at that office.

How can we track down problems? First, we look at the Round Trip Times (delays) for the entire link. Then we drill down on these delays and find out that they are coming from Copenhagen. And was due to services like Microsoft OneDrive.

Drilling Down Shows Delays At Copenhagen

How can we find out what applications are causing these delays? We then took a look at the Top Applications for Copenhagen. We saw that all traffic is getting an equal share. There is currently no Traffic Shaping (QoS) protecting any of this traffic. That means that all traffic on this site is unprotected and has to fight for equal share

OneDrive, Google Drive, Office 365 Email, Skype and Web all fight each other for bandwidth

Simple Fix - Implement Traffic Shaping Policies

Luckily this is a simple fix. With NetScope we can implement a Traffic Shaping policy by selecting it in our Policy Manager using a drop-down list. We don't need to limit any other traffic type. They're allowed to use the rest of the bandwidth if available. But after selecting a 10% guarantee, Salesforce traffic is guaranteed 10% of the total Copenhagen link.

And the results?

Copenhagen Salesforce traffic delays have been reduced from 2.5 seconds (2500 milliseconds) to no more than 2 milliseconds. This was a fantastic result for the Copenhagen IT team.

This type of Traffic Shaping (QoS) doesn't actually rate limit Microsoft OneDrive traffic. In fact, if available, OneDrive can max out the entire Copenhagen link. However, Salesforce traffic is guaranteed 10% of the total Copenhagen link size.

Do You Want To Transition To The Cloud?

You will need to make sure your QoS policies are ready to handle the flood of new traffic types. As you have seen with NetScope you can get both detailed Internet Traffic Visibility and easily apply Traffic Shaping to any application or web type.

https://netscope.com.au/download