Despite the fact that many employees are no longer permanently connected to the enterprise, network content distribution still impacts them, often leading to a poor digital experience. Remote workers are particularly sensitive to content distribution because the applications they now rely on, such as voice and video conferencing, are extremely bandwidth sensitive. What’s more, many remote workers may be sharing their home internet connection with other family members.
The problem actually becomes more complex, because you must now consider the impact to the employees’ internet connection in addition to the VPN infrastructure.
Combined with split-tunneling, the use of cloud-based content sources such as Windows Update and/or a Cloud management gateway and Cloud SaaS solutions can offload VPN traffic and reduce VPN infrastructure bottlenecks. However, these measures alone cannot prevent content transfers from negatively impacting the devices available bandwidth. Regardless of the source, the endpoint has a finite amount of available bandwidth.
Distributing content to your remote workforce often presents a paradox. Scheduling deployments after hours protects precious VPN capacity, but remote connections drop or time out at the end of the workday. Nomad, 1E’s hugely successful content deployment solution, saves an incredible amount of precious bandwidth on your internal networks by sharing content with peer systems.
But how can Nomad help when the devices are no longer clustered together in an office?
Nomad detects and monitors the true end-to-end available bandwidth, and automatically minimizes the impact to both your VPN infrastructure and your employees’ internet connection. By dynamically adjusting the transfer rate, it not only protects both networks, it also simultaneously maximizes the available bandwidth. As a result, deployments operate safely and efficiently at any time of the day.
Modern enterprise networks employ multiple tools to prioritize or limit certain types of traffic, such as rate limiters, QoS, and/or packet shaping technologies. Deprioritizing or limiting content distribution traffic can protect VPN networks from saturation, but they can only protect one segment of the remote worker’s connection and not the full route to devices. While arbitrary bandwidth caps prevent the use of any idle bandwidth available, they cannot adjust dynamically when bottlenecks arise across the full end-to-end connection. These tools allow you to consume network resources, but not with maximum efficiency.
Nomad never forces you to compromise efficiency to safely distribute content. It uses a sophisticated algorithm that looks beyond a single network segment to continuously monitor the available bandwidth across the full connection. If bandwidth is available, the transfer speeds up, if it becomes restricted, the transfer slows down.
Nomad’s workrate setting controls show how much of the available, not total, bandwidth it will use. A specific workrate can be applied to an individual package, a specific type of content, software updates or applications or to a specific device. You can also apply a workrate to each hour of the day and for each day of the week. Additionally, Nomad workrate can be lowered during peak business hours and increased after hours or at weekends.
When combined with 1E’s Windows Self Service (WSS), Nomad also enables the upgrade, replacement or wipe & load of Windows in the employees’ home office. It safely downloads and ensures all of the required content is available locally before the rebuild or upgrade process starts to ensure a successful and seamless deployment. When employees are in the office, Nomad will continue to protect the business network and content these devices downloaded over their home internet connection can be shared with peers. Plus, Nomad can provide visibility and control of Deliver Optimization, which is used by Intune, MS store and MS update.
Although there will likely be fewer people in the office, it is not only employees’ devices that we need to think about when we consider content distribution. Businesses still need servers, workstations, desktops, POS systems, kiosks, patient monitoring systems, manufacturing and other process control systems to run business operations and they all need to be managed to ensure they maintain compliance without saturating the network. What’s more, Nomad customers are licensed to use Tachyon features, including the Configuration Manager Client Health feature that ensures your CM clients are ready and able to successfully install software and patches to devices wherever they are on the network.
Find out more about delivering an optimized digital experience though seamless content distribution. Or, find out how business are using Nomad on their path to Modern Management
