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What is quality of service (QoS)?
Quality of service (QoS) is the description or measurement of the overall performance of a service, especially in terms of the user’s experience. Typically it is used in reference to telephony or computer networks, or to online and cloud-hosted services.
To quantitatively measure quality of service, several related aspects of the network service are often considered, such as packet loss, bit rate, throughput, transmission delay, availability, jitter, etc.
In the field of computer networking and other packet-switched telecommunication networks, quality of service refers to traffic prioritization and resource reservation control mechanisms rather than the achieved service quality. Quality of service is the ability to provide different priority to different applications, users, or data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow.
Why Quality of Service is important
As organizations of all types become increasingly dependent upon applications and services that are provided via cloud-integrated networks, there’s a growing need for capabilities that help ensure high quality of service, especially for critical and lag-sensitive applications.
For example, Voice over IP (VoIP) demands lag-free transmission, whereas email is very lag-tolerant. If you can delay email packets for a few seconds to let VoIP packets flow freely, it costs nothing in terms of the user’s experience of email service quality, but it ensures better VoIP QoS. As new applications with even stricter network performance requirements than VoIP’s become commonplace, QoS capabilities — including the most efficient possible use of bandwidth — are more important than ever.
What you can do
Barracuda CloudGen Firewall provides a large set of QoS features, including traffic shaping, traffic prioritization, and bandwidth partitioning, which assigns a bandwidth limit to specified types of traffic. Real-time traffic analysis lets you easily select traffic for different priority levels. Non-productive applications can be throttled or blocked entirely.
In addition, CloudGen Firewall delivers a variety of SD-WAN capabilities that can dramatically improve both bandwidth efficiency and service reliability, resulting in cost savings and improved QoS.
