Bandwidth Management

Bandwidth Management may seem like an unlikely topic for a proxy discussion blog this one. But it's an important feature in the proxy world that's probably not understood well, and not widely implemented in proxies.

For environments that have low bandwidth connections to the internet bandwidth management may make more sense than just block specific categories that you think are eating up bandwidth. This gives you the ability to allow a broader range of website categories that may be useful for your enterprise without having to have these activities eat up all the available bandwidth.

A good example of an implementation of bandwidth management could be a policy that implements a bandwidth limiting graphics and embedded video for the category sports. This would allow users to read the text of sports pages, but slows down the graphics and video from eating up all the bandwidth available, but still allows the download if the user is patient enough.

Bandwidth management may also be a good political solution in environments where outright blocks of specific website categories may cause an uproar in an enterprise or organization.

So the next time you're worrying about how much your organization is spending on bandwidth usage for Internet access, consider adding bandwidth management to your proxy's security policy.