With the new release of Kerio Control, many people will talk about how our implementation of QoS is simple yet so powerful. Some may note that traffic shaping can be managed with the same elegant GUI that we have been fine-tuning for eight years. Some may wonder why other UTM's QoS controls are so complicated. Others may ask, why is QoS included in a UTM at all?

IDENTIFYING THE PROBLEM
The increasing use of cloud solutions combined with the snail's pace roll out of fiber internet already taxes every network. Then throw in VoIP, Web conferences, file transfers and the assistant IT guy streaming Pandora. We live in a business environment where demand for bandwidth is outpacing the network's ability to supply it (especially in the SMB space).

CREATING A SOLUTION
Our quest to create a simple traffic shaping tool developed out of necessity. We need to provide our existing Kerio Control customers the best possible experience, especially with Kerio Operator as their IP PBX. The SIP protocol used by Kerio Operator (and many other VoIP solutions) requires a small but dedicated amount of bandwidth to ensure consistent connectivity and call quality. Kerio Control had the ability to limit usage of bandwidth but could not guarantee it for a given service until now. Once we figured out how to shape traffic around a single protocol, we realized we could just as easily do it for others. Thus, our full-blown Bandwidth Management feature was born.

SIZING UP THE COMPETITION
If you're the type of person that would rather avoid shaping traffic with a command-line interface or multiple GUI windows, you'll be more than happy with the Bandwidth Management and QoS module in Kerio Control 7.2, especially if you've already tried it with SonicWALL, Astaro, or Fortigate. You may also notice that our dynamic bandwidth management allocation is on-demand. Unlike many competitors, our traffic shaping rules do not require a constant percentage of bandwidth to be sacrificed. With Kerio Control 7.2, link capacity is only limited when priority traffic is flowing.

WE'RE LISTENING
We're interested in hearing back from you, especially if you've been trying to use our competitors' bandwidth management tools. Download and fire up Kerio Control 7.2 on your server, throw up some rules for your high-priority traffic, and post a comment about it below.