Opinion: What your WAN should be wearing

WAN optimisation in a nutshell
WAN optimisation is about enabling the Wide Area Network (WAN) to act like a high performance Local Area Network (LAN) thereby improving the performance of both the applications and the people connected to it.

Our WAN wardrobe is just fine thanks...
Are you sure? Whereas LANs commonly have bandwidth to burn, WANs typically have as little as 128 KB and most business critical application protocols simply were not designed for WAN environments – just like the latest fashion craze is not designed to flatter every body shape!

Without built-in quality of service protocols or prioritisation, WANs treat all traffic the same, which means data packets do not always get the priority their importance merits.

With initiatives like server consolidation and virtualisation on the up, network issues are only likely to get worse as remote users move further away from physical servers.

Faced with such issues, businesses have no choice but to either run their applications in a constrained environment or get hit with a high-cost bandwidth upgrade – often both. This is where WAN optimisation comes into its own – it can whip your customer’s network into red carpet shape in no time.

Why is this the season to update?
With network simplicity and enterprise agility increasingly important to this season’s CIO strategy, true WAN optimisation has to be mindful of the whole networking environment. Afterall, there is no use selling your customer the latest and greatest designer bag if it does not match the rest of their wardrobe.

Dressing for the climate
Not only are organisations virtualising their data centre, but many are migrating from Terminal Services environments to desktop consolidation, using VDI as the foundation to deliver centralised desktops to remote users.
The problem is that as branch offices become wholly dependent on the WAN they end up back at square one – caught out with the wrong undergarments experiencing slow application response times. Managing and optimising WAN traffic is crucial to the success of virtual desktop projects.

WAN optimisation both improves application performance and mitigates the inherent WAN issues that jeopardise virtualisation projects.
So maybe it’s time your customers updated and optimised their WAN wardrobe. Just like a classic little black dress, it is an investment that is always easy to justify and will still be proving its worth for many seasons to come.