Looking Towards An Optimised Future
The broad use of networks in enterprise organisations have revolutionised business. Today, Local Area Networks (LANs) and Wide Area Networks (WAN) are more important than ever. They need to cover greater distances, straddle more branch offices and store more data in more places. It all adds up to a much greater strain on IT, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
Many leading global enterprise businesses have already discovered that today’s WAN has a lot of room for improvement and that solutions that seem futuristic, are already available. The best part is that WAN optimisation directly leads to an improved business productivity, meaning OPEX conscious IT leaders can see the value in numbers right away.
Today’s professional service providers can design, install and manage a WAN that they will then optimise and maintain. Over the years, the measurable improvements in this space have gone from marginal to mind-blowing.
For instance, in most cases WAN throughput is less than 1% of LAN throughput. This means that applications like MS Office may run well over a 100 Mbps office LAN (at around 40 Mbps), but often run up to two hundred times slower over a WAN (at around 200 Kbps).
What would boosting that speed one hundred times do for your office productivity? Now imagine comparable improvements across MFS (Managed Firewall Services), MAPI (Messaging Application Programming Interface), Sharepoint, Backup, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and SQL (Structured Query Language) – it all adds up to accelerated applications that effectively translate to faster business speed and greater agility.
Another area offering great improvement opportunities is bandwidth. With the right in-path technology installed, a typical WAN optimization technology can cut bandwidth utilisation by 60% to 95%. This is a key for a growing remote workforce and can directly increase WAN capacity by as much as five times. What could be accomplished with all that extra capacity in your organisation?
Many CIOs and CTOs are currently looking for more capacity for a growing number of branch office sites. And there are products readily available now that enable consolidation of many of those branch servers to the data centre or private Cloud. Successful WAN consolidation to data centres is now a reality.
The same dramatic improvements apply to the increasingly important area of backup. Imagine backing up through WAN five to fifty times faster. Today’s optimised WANs can fasten backup times from 24 hours down to just four hours and even adjust traffic speeds dynamically, based on behaviour, to accommodate backups in progress.
These dramatic improvements aside, one of the most impressive aspects of a modern service provider of WAN optimisation service has to be customer portals. Best-in-class service providers now offer customer portals that can work on tablet or mobile, integrate through API, share information with teams and tap into the service provider’s support network for on-call service support. A customer portal should be a logical extension of a comprehensive customer service offering.
A good WAN optimisation service should include professional consulting, design, proactive monitoring, maintenance and robust customer support – across every communication channel in use.
What does it all mean for the future of IT?
With a single service provider a business can now:
- Accelerate network performance
- Gain complete control over IT
- Resolve issues faster
- Protect data more effectively
With all these clear benefits, it is easy to see why global future-ready competitors are already using WAN optimisation, and why those businesses that continue to ignore it may consign themselves to the history books.
(June, 2016)