Over the last month, more and more businesses have found themselves working in predominantly online modes. Working from home, i.e. teleworking, is now the new normal. That means we have all had to be creative about how we structure our work days, build our work spaces and how we interact with our colleagues. Virtual meetings and video conferencing is now a standard part of daily life for many organisations. However, not all organisations are appropriately equipped to utilise this technology to its full potential. There is no use holding online meetings if the sound and video is jumpy, or the connection times out half way through. Ensuring your network is optimised for video conferencing is vital to your organisation’s ongoing success during these uncertain times.

The differences between streaming video and hosting a live conference are vast. When streaming a standard cat video from say YouTube, the video downloads in small parts in advance, which mitigates any network instability during playback. When you host live video, data must be received consistently in real time so that the content is clear. On average, businesses need to account for around 100 users sharing the internet, with each making 5 to 6 calls and accounting for at minimum 5 percent of the concurrent bandwidth overhead utilisation. Add another ten percent if you are using online conferencing due to the additional buffer strength required.

It sounds complicated, but it doesn’t need to be. That’s why we have put together this handy guide on how you can optimise your network experience for video conferencing to tackle the nuances of this format.

First things first

Whether you are just starting to use video conferencing, or are using it more with more users, it is integral that you scale up your network bandwidth to meet the demands placed on it. The transmission capacity of a connection is an important factor when determining the quality and speed of a network or the internet connection. Ask yourself if your service provider is giving you full bandwidth? One way you can tell is based on the quality of your video conferences. Meetings with the appropriate bandwidth will be stable and seamless. If the video and/or audio is sluggish, there might be a synching problem between motion and audio. Or, content sharing could be experiencing a delay. There is a range of equipment, including Opmantek’s opFlow, that will help enhance your overall video call and conference experience.

How opFlow can help with video conferencing?

When conducting a video conference between two users, about 2Mbps of upload and download bandwidth is used for both users. This is the minimum requirement to ensure the conference is smooth and clear with high quality audio and video. Opmantek opFlow gives valuable network insights that allows companies and users to see how much of the network is being used, by who and in what way. This is vital information for troubleshooting any issues caused by bandwidth availability. Further, opFlow rapidly identifies any bottlenecks occurring affecting bandwidth so that they can be quickly rectified. It produces summary reports to provide the greatest possible transparency on usage.

Traffic and security analysis is another important factor to consider when looking at bandwidth related interruptions. opFlow identifies any abnormalities in traffic patterns, and detects security threats to allow for the prevention of issues before they arise. This includes managing congestion, checking areas of high data usage and honing in on suspicious behaviour. When it comes to navigating the future of daily operations, infrastructure planning and capacity management is vital. Building video conferencing into plans is easy with the key information provided through opFlow – for both planning and network capacity management. There is also the capability for reduced downtime through the rapid change impact identification feature.

For added convenience, opFlow is extremely affordable and is compatible with multiple vendors and protocols including:

– Cisco NetFlow
– NetFlow-Lite
– NSEL
– Juniper J-Flow sFlow and IPFIX.

In summary

Now is the time to diversify and embrace the evolution of new business practices and standards. For many, this is leading to positive change organisation-wide. For more tips on optimising your network, network management, or to find out more about how Opmantek’s opFlow low-cost features can help you start managing and analysing your Netflow, contact us today.

What is Telehealth

Telehealth is a system that allows patients to receive high-quality healthcare services from the comfort of their own homes via the use of telecommunication technology. Telehealth services normally consist of a smart hub that allows patients to enter their personal health data, including vital signs, either manually or automatically via the use of various medical devices, such as blood glucose monitors, pulse oximeters and blood pressure readers. The data collected is then sent to either a non-clinical or clinical monitoring service that monitors the patient’s health or alerts the appropriate health provider.

Who benefits from Telehealth services?

A Telehealth system is particularly useful for patients with long-term health conditions, patients who live in remote areas, or for patients who are self-isolating during the current coronavirus pandemic. Telehealth technology can improve patient access to specialist healthcare services while eliminating the need to travel for medical advice, therefore allowing patients to remain more independent, self-manage their conditions and limit the strain on GP and primary health services. Telehealth systems can also offer education and peer support services to health professionals while providing patients with mentoring and coaching services via a series of questions and answers.

How COVID-19 has fast-tracked the healthcare system

Before the coronavirus outbreak, there was a degree of progress in Telehealth technology, but the pandemic has lead to renewed evidence of the value of Telehealth, as public health officials are encouraging healthcare providers to expand their Telehealth services to smartphones and other tools to make them more accessible. 

Telehealth technology is helping to reduce the strain on public health services by virtually communicating with patients and triaging them, reducing widespread panic by assuring patients that they do not possess any of the coronavirus symptoms and are not required to visit already overcrowded hospitals. Telehealth technology also has the benefit of limiting human contact and preventing the spread of the virus.

New tools and technologies in Telehealth services such as live video consultations are proving to be a huge asset to healthcare providers to connect patients with doctors while remaining isolated. Other services such as instant messaging for therapy services, secure emails for ongoing communications and informed telephone consultations are also proving to be useful. 

Other promising tools include the use of chatbots and symptom trackers to interact with patients and refer them for in-patient care, as their technology is designed to evolve as more information is gathered about the coronavirus. Medical tricorders and home monitoring is another promising approach to at-home patient care. Currently used in the management of certain chronic health conditions, remote patient monitoring uses consumer devices such as smart TVs and smartwatches to provide remote examinations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created renewed awareness of the benefits of Telehealth services and is bringing them to the frontline of patient care, which is expected to reshape the future of public health services.

How Opmantek can improve healthcare efficiency

Opmantek’s Network Management Information System (NMIS) is designed to monitor the performance of an organisation’s data network. It can be used to monitor device health and bandwidth. It can be used to resolve issues before they become problems and provide valuable information for planning infrastructure changes.

With the renewed awareness of the benefits of Telehealth, an efficient and patient-driven online healthcare system is becoming essential. Opmantek’s Network Information Management System can streamline digital outputs for hospitals and make them more efficient to improve patient care. Adding Opmantek’s commercial software provides additional insights and automation capabilities through to performing traffic analysis better enabling bandwidth management. And for a truely large scale operation the distributed polling capabilities to improve scalability.

opFlow

Opmantek’s opFlow, is designed to gather network insights to analyse the network. For instance it can with location of attack vectors and pick up on network errors so that they can be resolved quickly, leading to reduced downtime for everyone including hospital networks.

For more information about how Opmantek’s products can help you set your business or healthcare organisation on the path to digital transformation, get in touch with our team of experts today.

The world is changing in many ways as the global Covid-19 pandemic upends the way we live, learn and work. We have lots of adults and children now working or schooling from home and using video conferencing and other collaboration tools to do so. For some, this may be an easy adjustment, but for most, the transition to remote working is challenging.

In this post, we will discuss how to deal with multi-users in a home environment operating on lower bandwidth (5MB to 20MB).

Collaboration and learning tools

The sudden rise of remote working and education from home has caused the popularity of learning and collaboration tools to explode. Video conferencing software Zoom’s share price has more than doubled in the past month, and Microsoft’s cloud computing SaaS Azure and collaboration tool Teams has seen an astonishing 784% rise in use!

However, the challenge at home is when your family connects several desktops, laptops and phones on one network, making it difficult for Mum to make that all-important video conferencing call. With Dad streaming Netflix, daughter Jess studying her next curriculum online, and little Danny uploading his TikTok masterpiece, and you might soon have some Wi-fi wars breaking out in the homestead, which is the last thing we need right now!

The answer here is to downturn all these applications by changing their bandwidth use and quality. As a result, you will improve your quality of service (QOS).

What is QOS?

Quality of Service is an excellent, and often unknown, tool that allows you to train your router to distribute your available bandwidth between applications. With smart QoS rules, mum’s Zoom conferencing video call won’t stutter while Jess uploads her assignment online. However, managing QOS on routers can be technically hard. For the not-so-tech-savvy, adjusting the bandwidth use and quality on the applications themselves may be a more straightforward solution.

For example, Zoom video conferencing allows you to adjust the priority for Zoom traffic on their network (Source). Likewise, streaming platforms such as Netflix also have the option to adjust your data usage settings by following the steps here. Ultimately, most applications will allow you to down-turn use and quality to determine which takes priority for the home user.

If you find yourself having trouble keeping the whole family connected and happy, check out your application settings and adjust their bandwidth.

A customer of ours reached out to us recently to help them solve and potentially reduce the outages they were experiencing to their public website. The first step to help remedy this situation was to identify the root cause of the fault.

Digging into the logs, we were able to identify there had been an accidental (perhaps) Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack produced by around 1200 IP Address crawlers that overloaded both the web server and the application, requiring a server reboot. The resolution for this singular problem was to block that IP Address range to prevent this from occurring again. This, however, was only a partial solution, as this could happen again from a separate range.

This is where the power of Opmantek software began to shine.

Firstly, the engineering team must shift their mindset from a reactive one to being proactive; identify the issue before it becomes a problem and take automated action to prevent an outage. Dependent on how your network is set up, your staffing situation and personal preferences, you may tackle this issue in a variety of different ways.

There are several methods that can be implemented to identify the root cause of the service impact. From NMIS, you could run a service check on the web server that looks to identify if the quantity of connections exceeds a present threshold. You can test the number of open connections on the web server with a command such as;

netstat -ntu | awk '{print $5}' | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

One step further and we can use a combination of NMIS and opTrend to monitor for a sudden increase in CPU/memory utilization on the server and raise an event from there.

Once the event condition is satisfied the next step is to identify the attack vector and remediate. In this case opEvents could retrieve and parse the Apache logs, identifying the IP Address range, then instruct opConfig is reconfigure the necessary firewalls and applications to block them. Nick Day, Opmantek’s Senior Network Engineer in Asia-PAC, helped another customer by leveraging automated remediation; you can find out how in this blog.

Not comfortable with this level of automation? Once the event is properly identified, engineers could be notified of the situation and using opConfig’s Virtual Operator reconfigure the firewalls/applications to block the DDos attack and restart any services/applications/servers all without giving those operators command line access or sudo/root privilege.

Thousands of businesses worldwide, many of which have never had work from home processes or policies in place have suddenly had to accommodate remote access to company networks, the relocation of hardware assets as staff take key equipment home and increased stress on systems and software as staff utilising home internet connections with limited bandwidth access applications designed to be supported by corporate networks putting strain on resources and creating stress for the IT departments responsible for the digital security of network, software and hardware.

If you are an IT manager coping with the sudden adaptation to an online businesses structure, these 5 Opmantek product features and tools will help to provide you with peace of mind that everything is under control, and if you’re are an Australian Healthcare or Government organisation you can apply to have the entire commercial suite of Opmantek network management and IT Audit tools provided FREE of charge under our COVID-19 Software Relief Program.

Hardware Asset Tracking

Conduct a digital audit of your infrastructure and hardware to keep track of when devices were last seen and where.

Application Monitoring

Keep an eye on the performance of private cloud and SaaS applications that may be slow or underperforming due to higher than normal traffic and other response issues.

Anomaly Detection

Let Opmantek’s machine learning, trending and event management modules alert you when unusual activity occurs on your network or to any of your networked devices.

Remote Configuration Management

Monitor, track and update the configuration of core network infrastructure including security settings and firewalls remotely and get alerts of any unauthorised changes.  Roll out and roll back new device configurations manually or automatically in seconds.

Automated Event Remediation

Use the Event Management scripting tool to proactively trigger automated responses to a variety of common network issues, resolving tickets before human intervention is required and storing logs that can be reviewed and analysed to put more preventative measures in place.

Combined with the scalability, reliability, ease of deployment and low-cost support that Opmantek Software are recognised for globally, if you need intelligent network management that works anywhere and everywhere, download the Opmantek VM today.