What is “Quality of Service?”
QoS stands for Quality of Service, aka, the ability to prioritize what’s happening on your business network. This means that you can ensure mission-critical uses like VoIP and video calls take priority over things like streaming services. QoS provides traffic control mechanisms on networks, allowing you to use your resources where they’re needed most. With a QoS plan in place, your business assigns different priorities to various applications, users, and data flows to guarantee high performance at all times. QoS aims to ensure crucial business applications get the resources they need at all times.
Think of QoS like a busy roadway in a large city. High traffic leads to long commutes and congestion while negatively impacting the environment. Similarly, a shared network can easily become congested with different applications and users. The volume of activities can create latency and slow down your network, causing productivity to suffer. Network congestion can cause poor video quality, choppy voice calls, lagging email, or slow upload/download times.
On busy city roads, you’ll see priority lanes for certain users – carpoolers, rapid transit riders, or cyclists. QoS lets you do the same thing for a business network, building a “priority lane” for the business activities that are most critical to your operations.
Security and QoS – A Second Line of Defence
QoS enhances your network security tools by providing more insight into your normal network traffic patterns. If a virus or an attack makes its way past a firewall, the traffic abnormality will trigger a workflow to manage the change. This level of insight can also help identify the source of the problem, so the integrity of your network and business is protected.
How to Integrate QoS into your Business
With the growing popularity of cloud-based applications, QoS is more important than ever. By prioritizing bandwidth for cloud applications, your team can deliver timely services and products to customers without interruption.
To start the conversation, ask these three important questions:
- Does your existing network support QoS standards?
- Is Quality of Service covered by your existing Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
- Does your IT plan include internal network setup and management to ensure QoS is working right for the needs of the business?
These questions can quickly identify if QoS needs to be a bigger part of your IT plan going forward. Your business network is full of opportunities and iTel’s team is happy to help you make the most of it. We specialize in designing custom network solutions for businesses in a variety of industries and are dedicated to your success. Contact us today.
