Is Application Acceleration Enough for Performance Over the WAN?

Branch office users are crying out for better performance of business-critical applications over the WAN. The impact of latency and congestion as well as limited bandwidth is affecting their productivity. Research shows that business performance starts to decline when applications exceed a 5 second delay in response times. This makes a job of IT departments challenging as they look to support business services and mitigate revenue loss while saving on bandwidth costs and getting the most out of their current enterprise resources as they work with limited budgets.

The inability to prevent performance issues before end-users are impacted is the top challenge for managing application performance over the WAN. How to deal with the increase in voice and video traffic is another, as well as the lack of visibility into the end-user experience. Organizations are also challenged by increasing transfers of large files between network locations and an increase in complexity of applications.

Is Application Performance Management the key to WAN Optimization Services?

WAN Optimization is a top technology under consideration by IT organizations according to research by The Info Pro in their Technology Heat Index report. Many Service Providers are creating WAN Optimization services to meet the requirements of customer who want WAN Optimization but prefer to outsource management.

Organizations know that they can reduce IT expenditures as well as deliver new services more effectively by consolidating IT resources in the Data Center and by deploying WAN Optimization they can still give branch office users LAN like application performance. Whether organizations deploy WAN Optimization themselves or get it as a managed service they need to be able to justify the budget expenditure and that means being able to fully understand their requirements and being able to measure the performance improvements delivered of deployment of WAN Optimization.

An effective evaluation starts with an accurate baseline of network and application performance, followed by a determination of which applications are good candidates for acceleration. Once WAN Optimization is deployed application performance improvements need to be validated against the baseline. Available network paths should be utilized according to application needs and network resources should be aligned with application performance requirements.