WAN Acceleration: Accelerate Savings and Productivity

Anytime, anywhere applications access is still important, even if business activity doesn’t appear to warrant it, so there are several reasons to consider WAN acceleration.

“… you can expect WAN performance increases of anything from five to fifty and even up to 100 times faster.”

Firstly, because WAN acceleration provides LAN-like access to data and applications throughout an entire network, it allows for real time collaboration–and thus greater efficiency and productivity–among remote office locations (and mobile workers), vendors and customers. Secondly, because WAN acceleration makes more efficient use of IT infrastructure and bandwidth, you can reduce network capital and operating costs. Depending on which solution you implement, you can expect WAN performance increases of anything from five to fifty and even up to 100 times faster.

WAN Acceleration Pathway

1. Assess your current network situation: Factors include the number of remote offices, monthly bandwidth costs of each, the number of servers and number of users per office.
2. Assess your WAN acceleration options: For example, speeding up application access (file sharing, Web, FTP, email, document management, custom applications), consolidating IT resources (data backup and replication, security), improving disaster recovery and business continuity contingencies.
3. QoS gives some benefits: If your WAN acceleration needs are modest, then a Quality of Service (QoS)-only product, which doesn’t accelerate the network throughput itself but simply prioritises bandwidth allocation among different WANs, may be sufficient.
4. Comprehensive WAN acceleration: At the next level up, optimizing the network (via compression or TCP acceleration) will generally yield 5% - 20% acceleration. But the network is only one of several factors slowing WAN performance, so if your needs are extensive, you’ll want a comprehensive approach that addresses the three main WAN problems: inefficiencies within the actual applications, verbose protocols in high latency networks and bandwidth constraints.
5. Review secure connections options: As an alternative, remember that leased lines are the most expensive of the secure connections options between LANs. Many companies that don’t need ultra-secure point-to-point connections, use packet switching or VPNs to interconnect their LANS–in effect creating a WAN. VPNs are also a good way of differentiating (i.e. prioritising) different classes of user traffic running over a secure underlying network.

Ask us how you can benefit from WAN acceleration.

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