Why Quality Of Service Is Critical To Enterprise Networks

Quality of Service (QoS) is a method for prioritizing network traffic, and can solve your network traffic issues to keep your bandwidth under control.

Articles published July 20, 2017 by Ben Killion

An efficient and effective network for communications is a critical part of any organization.

Have you ever been on a phone or video call and, suddenly, the audio became choppy or the picture was blurry, and you could only hear snippets of what the person on the other line was saying? Maybe your call was dropped, and you had to inconveniently reschedule your phone call for a different time.

These things can happen if Quality of Service (QoS) is not established on the network.

QoS is a method for prioritizing network traffic. It can solve your network traffic issues and keep your bandwidth under control, saving you money and headaches.

On a daily basis, your network is transporting your organization’s voice and video calls as well as file transfers and data from a number of applications. If your organization has network bandwidth to spare and not much network traffic that overloads your bandwidth, then you may not have much need for QoS. However, if you find that you’re constantly experiencing delays or interruptions on your network, it is probably a sign that your network traffic is reaching the maximum bandwidth, making several applications and functions extremely delayed or unavailable for periods of time.

What is QoS?

What exactly is QoS? Here’s how Microsoft defines it: “QoS for networks is an industry-wide set of standards and mechanisms for ensuring high-quality performance for critical applications. By using QoS mechanisms, network administrators can use existing resources efficiently and ensure the required level of service without reactively expanding or over-provisioning their networks.” Essentially, QoS helps avoid network congestion by prioritizing business-critical traffic so you can keep your business running along smoothly.

What QoS Does

When you think of the word quality, you think of something that is excellent, fair, and helpful. As it relates to your network, quality means consistent, reliable, and scalable. QoS creates a set of priorities that enables your network to provide consistent and reliable access to important network resources.

For example: your phone calls and other real-time communications can be prioritized over other network traffic, so that you don’t have to worry about dropped calls or interruptions.

This way, when there is a lot of traffic on your network, your mission-critical applications can still have the bandwidth they require. Additionally, QoS allows other less critical applications to still access the network, but they may experience minor delays that usually go unnoticed by the end user.

QoS Benefits

Overall, implementing QoS on your network can benefit your organization in several ways.

First, it benefits every user of your network, because it allows them to do their work without interruptions or downtime. With QoS running in the background, your employees can stay productive. It also benefits you, and can provide peace of mind knowing your network traffic will run efficiently. Since your essential business functions and applications have the bandwidth they need, you can conduct business with less distributions and frustrations.

Second, it saves you money. Instead of upgrading your bandwidth or buying better technology, QoS allows you to use your existing bandwidth and technology more efficiently. Prioritizing your traffic lets you rearrange and reorganize your network resources, ultimately providing a better experience with overall network usage.

Lastly, QoS gives you more control over your network. If you’re not a tech-savvy person, then understanding your organization’s network and technology can give you headaches. QoS allows you to manage your network in a way that is easier to understand, while at the same time, gives you more options and functionality to help your network run more efficiently and securely. If you’d rather not deal with your organization’s network at all, many technology companies can handle your network and technology needs for you, so that you can stay focused on your organization’s overall needs and growth.

A Focus on Enterprise Network Efficiency

It’s safe to say the main focus of QoS is to boost network efficiency and allow your organization to continue to operate smoothly with minimal interruption. Today, having QoS is becoming more and more essential, as an increasing number of applications and Internet of Things (IoT) devices become necessary to run a business.

With QoS, that important phone call is completed with no loss of signal, patchiness, or connectivity issues, bandwidth is managed, and you can carry on conducting business without a hitch or glitch.