Enterprise customers face a growing need to track application use, manage network bandwidth resources, and identify malicious and otherwise unwanted traffic.Unlike controlled Systems Network Architecture (SNA) environments, IP-based environments lack the structure to ensure appropriate application behavior. Mission-critical applications contend for available bandwidth with noncritical applications, and many applications are subjected to network latency and jitter characteristics that impede their ability to function appropriately. With between 50 percent and 60 percent of enterprise bandwidth now being consumed by peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic, the productivity of the network is significantly compromised.The issue is significantly worse in specific environments. Large Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) images impede other network traffic in healthcare environments, financial institutions wrestle with the impact of "webification" of specialized time-sensitive applications (for example, teller applications, trading applications), and the efficiency of manufacturing operations computer numerical control (CNC) machinery, purchasing, inventory operations) is reduced by the transfer of large CAD images. In such environments, the IT department requires a solution that is able to identify the impact of these applications on overall network traffic. The Cisco Application Performance Assurance (APA) Network Module is designed to provide detailed application visibility in an Integrated Services Router (ISR) integrated form factor.Residing in the 2800 Series Integrated Services Router, the Cisco APA Network Module facilitates the detection of virtually any network application, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, multimedia streams, broadband voice, Web browsing, instant messaging, and forms of unwanted and malicious traffic such as P2P. Once this traffic has been identified, the network administrator is able to appropriately configure the ISR to make sure that the required quality of service (QoS) policies to control and prioritize the traffic is put in place. The result is overall reduction of network congestion, improved application performance, and the ability to plan more effective network bandwidth upgrades.