Is WAN Optimization the Answer to Today’s IT Dilemma?

In today’s challenging economy many customers are asking how they can reduce IT costs while responding to increasing demands for IT services? What do you do in tough economic times when you need to lower branch office IT spending but at the same time you need to provide new productivity tools to branch office workers?

Your branch offices are where your customers come to do business so your branch office workers need IT resources that let them conduct business efficiently. In the past the answer was to install distributed computing systems in each branch office. These days that solution is costly to implement and to maintain, especially with reduced IT staffing.

Many organizations are moving applications to the data center, to reduce IT costs and gain better control over data, but that means greater demands are being put on the WAN, which impacts application performance. At the same time organizations want to ramp up their use of VoIP to extend the reach of their telephone network and bring costs down, but VoIP is especially sensitive to network congestion. So what should they do?

The answer might be WAN Optimization, a technology that lets you centralize applications yet provide a LAN like experience over the WAN to branch office workers. Making the decision to deploying WAN Optimization has its challenges though. In a tightening economy IT managers must be able to justify the budget expense, which means seeing immediate benefits and demonstrating ROI.

To be successful application delivery solutions for the WAN must focus on the needs of both network managers and application managers so they can each reach their goals of reducing overall branch IT costs, improving employee and IT staff effectiveness and making the network ready for new services rollout.

Ease of implementation, the ability to avoid increased WAN costs and reduced call to the help desk makes WAN Optimization a compelling option for IT managers. Is WAN Optimization right for your organization? Are you taking all of the considerations in to account? To get the whole story check out this paper by IDC: WAN Application Delivery: Networking Solutions for a Tough Economy