“It’s amazing how little quality-of-service research is done,” Whiteley says, to ensure that the apps that are most important to the business get the necessary amount of bandwidth to keep them humming. Just 11 percent to 13 percent of IT organizations analyze bandwidth usage down to the detail of individual applications, according to Forrester.

Companies such as Cisco, Expand and Packeteer have long offered bandwidth management products, such as Cisco’s WAN optimization hardware and software solutions, which can help you monitor and manage bandwidth allocation. But now they are addressing the video trend. Cisco offers software that gets added to its WAE appliances or its widely deployed Integrated Services Routers to specifically manage bandwidth problems related to video. The software, according to Cisco, will compress and cache the video (so it doesn’t travel repeatedly over the WAN) and eliminate unnecessary “chattiness” between apps and video (like instructions and status updates).

Tool Talk

A new breed of appliances from companies such as Blue Coat offer caching and compression, plus the ability to ensure oversight of all video traffic and then simplify that oversight. These boxes, which usually live at the Internet gateway on the network, offer a wide variety of rules and policies that can be applied and managed. Blue Coat’s SG appliances give you the option of blocking all streaming video, video from specific sites or just from parts of sites. (For instance, you might allow CNNMoney but not CNNSI.) Or you can choose to block all streaming sites except a specific group during business hours.

Then there’s the dimmer switch approach: letting streaming video take only a certain percentage of your overall bandwidth—after that, users will have to live with slower video.

In the future, says Joe Skorupa, a Gartner research VP, CIOs can expect to see more multifunction WAN appliances that will handle caching, compression, application performance monitoring, blocking, security and maybe VPN tasks.

Another reason to consider an appliance is if your company has centralized servers to simplify Sarbanes-Oxley compliance by putting all backup data in one location. In that case your users are now sending more and more data over the WAN rather than grabbing it from a local server. This can cause documents or apps to slow down.

Nascar’s Worling, who experienced just this problem, is adding bandwidth optimization appliances from Juniper to Nascar’s network (Juniper’s WXC 500 and WXC 250 models). But that change alone won’t be enough to address Nascar’s needs. If you have a large amount of business-related video traffic, an appliance will often help, but you may also need to upgrade your Internet pipes.