Characterizing corporate network traffic beyond bandwidth

Companies increasingly rely on Internet for effective and efficient business communication. As Information Technology (IT) provides the infrastructure backbone for business activities, a corporate network connects the company to Internet and enables it to perform its activities globally. The corporate carries data packets generated by the users´ while performing their business tasks. Traditionally, the infrastructure operations mainly maintain the data carrying capacity and network devices performance. The research provides a simple method of mapping the business activity reflected by the network data. Modified Attribute Oriented Induction (AOI) approach mines the network data for mapping corporate users´ activities. A frequency count was taken for each attributes of interest to show what happened in the network. The collected data were samples taken within a certain sampling period. based on the frequency count, we define four novel corporate network characteristics: Network Infrastructure characteristics, User Characteristics, Accessibility Characteristics, and Activity Characteristics. It can be concluded that the method could provide the management a general overview of the usage of its infrastructure and lead to efficient, effective and secure Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure.