If the anecdotal stories we have been hearing are any indication, most enterprises are not as prepared as they should be for Big Data and the increased traffic that their WAN is being asked to handle. For some organizations, a rigid architecture and lack of network visibility or resources are making it difficult to scale or adequately understand application performance.
To help you get better insight into the “health” of your WAN, we are developing a WAN Health Checkup tool. Level 3’s WAN Health Checkup tool, which takes about 10 minutes to run, asks you for information on your WAN in regard to the network in general (performance, size, etc.), the technologies you use, the network topology and the applications. Once you’ve gone through the 
assessment, the tool offers guidance on your WAN’s health and whether you could stay the course with the WAN you have, take steps to optimize its performance, or consider significant changes. In a sense, the tool gives you a preview of what you would discuss with our solutions architects in an initial meeting.
One of the unique aspects of the tool is that it uses “Application Fingerprinting” – a process that matches network capabilities with application needs. And while we know it’s very difficult to predict which applications will be on your network two or three years from now, and also hard to nail down the network topology size, this tool can give you valuable insight into the architecture you’ll need going forward, especially if you request a detailed response based on the data you’ve provided through the tool.
We leveraged our solution architects’ development skills and put our WAN Health Checkup tool through the paces here, but now we need the help of the smart folks like you to get through our next sprint. We’re looking for Beta testers to push us through this next step of development. We invite you to get an early look at the tool and help make it better. If you would like to participate, you can register for the beta trial today!
About Michael Anderson
