Saturday, September 12, 2009

Are You Getting the WAN Advantage to Your Branch Office?

Are your WAN services delivered as a part of a comprehensive plan? These days with the need to reduce costs it’s a good time to rethink how you are serving your branch office IT needs. With advances in technology you can do things in new ways. You might find that you can reduce your branch office infrastructure and deliver better services to your branch office workers. There are a few things to consider. Are your branch office routers capable of delivering a suite of services including security? Are you taking advantage of unified communications? Are you supporting increasing use of Video? Are you able to ensure application performance?

There are plenty of reasons to rethink your WAN strategy. If your organization is global then your people need to collaborate across greater distances but if you are consolidating branch office servers and data centers they are further than ever from the applications that they use, especially if you have increasing numbers of mobile and home workers. Security is an increasing concern with so many new applications and services being used bringing increasing numbers of exploits. Service delivery can be impacted by inconsistent WAN topologies that were developed over time and don’t take increasing end user traffic in to account. All of these challenges mean that productivity can be impacted unless a consistent plan is executed on.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Is your WAN Optimization Solution Meeting the Application Acceleration Challenge?

The economy is in a downturn and your IT budget is cut and now management is asking you to come up with ideas on how to save money and increase the business’s productivity. There a number of proven initiatives you can undertake and there are some newer ones you might be looking at to get the most benefit, but they all impact performance of applications over the WAN and that means that you need a WAN Optimization solution that can meet the challenge.

Many organizations are consolidating file servers from the branch offices to the data center to reduce the number of underutilized servers and take advantage of server virtualization to get the most out of newer higher performing servers. Organizations are increasingly moving to Web-based applications to eliminate the need to install client software on the PC and to simplify application administration. A WAN Optimization solution helps in these cases by providing caching and compression to speed file transfers and acceleration for HTTP and SSL, but is that enough?