The most valuable feature is the ability to manage the traffic at the application layer. It makes things a lot easier. We're not digging for port numbers and IP addresses and different services. We're able to say, "We need to make sure that Zoom is a priority for faculty." It makes us far more responsive in our ability to do things and speed up the process. We're a very small shop, so having something that's straightforward and easy to use is a big help. The fact that we are more responsive is a big thing for us because, with the packet shaping solution we used to have, it took a lot of work to do anything. This is far more straightforward and easy to do. It gives you the visibility into the things that you're doing, and you get suggestions as well. That's helpful. Every time there's a shift in what the population is doing, the Exinda recommends, "Hey, we're seeing a lot of Dropbox traffic. You don't have a rule for that. You should probably think about doing that." I also use it to watch the traffic on the internet. We have a few options for doing that, but one of the easiest is through the Exinda dashboard and the real-time monitoring. One of the nice things that Exinda has enabled us to do is to set up the monitoring of certain things. We can monitor the response to our webpage. We can also monitor our different systems—some are cloud-based, some are here—and create service levels for monitoring so that we ensure that critical systems are up, running, and responding appropriately. Everybody is moving everything to the cloud. When they wanted to move our website from on-prem to the cloud, in the initial testing people were saying, "Well, it's a little slower," and I said, "Well, of course it's slower, because when you're on campus, you're not leaving to go to the internet to get to the webpage." I was actually able to show metrics of why that was and how. We still monitor that. It didn't ultimately change anybody's mind, but at least we were able to say, "You can't have the same level of service from the cloud that you get on-prem."
