Mobile boom creates network speed bumps

Using the caching engine increased performance to lower the load times to “a couple of seconds”, Rajeev Mitroo, Blue Coat’s managing director for Australia and New Zealand, says.

Citrix’s Network Cloud Gateway also has a secondary role besides providing the processing grunt for encrypting many VPN connections. The Gateway provides single sign-on for cloud applications such as Salesforce.com and Citrix Gotomeeting which avoids the typical scenario where a user has one set of log-in credentials for the corporate network and another set for each software-as-a-service (SaaS) application.

“The last thing I want is to give Salesforce.com or Microsoft Office 365 access to my authentication directory. So Cloud Gateway creates a trust point in the middle,” says Hackney, who uses six SaaS applications at work.

“Instead of typing in a username and password into my browser I simply click on an icon for Salesforce.com which opens the browser and authenticates me transparently as a user.”

Following the right protocol

The shifting sands of technology have forced network optimisation vendors to change course when it comes to protocols. For years vendors spent huge amounts of R&D funds creating WAN protocols to accelerate Microsoft traffic in the 

client-server environment, such as SIFS, MAPI and SMB v1 and v2. “Protocol acceleration is a deeply personal thing to an organisation because you care about the protocols that exist in your WAN,” Citrix’s Hackney explains.

However, the move to virtualised desktops and applications has seen the protocols shrink back into being data centre protocols, ironically the place from which they originated, Hackney says.

Companies buying network optimisation devices need to consider not just the protocols they are using but what they might use in the future, he adds. “If you talk about a private cloud or data centre model, the important thing is to understand the protocols that are traversing the WAN.

In the future they will most likely be ICA or other virtualised desktop delivery protocols.

“As a reseller or a customer the most relevant thing for selecting WAN optimisation is selecting the protocols relevant to me now and in the future and selecting a technology that accelerates those.”