WAN Optimization Costs and Benefits5993484
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WAN optimization technology has been around for some time now, however in an environment where users are demanding more and more bandwidth heavy applications, many companies are finding their networks are creaking under the weight. There is a conundrum facing businesses - to increase bandwidth availability or to invest in making the network use bandwidth more effectively. In essence, this is a simple trade-off between doing nothing and struggling with the problem, adding more bandwidth or turning to some form of acceleration or network optimization.
In the first instance, the option to maintain the status quo and make do with what you have is a highly expensive decision. Doing nothing in this instance still incurs a heavy opportunity cost in terms of lost production and the inability to seize business opportunities because workers are unable to respond to them on a timely basis effectively. The second option is to upgrade bandwidth availability, however as we all know this is expensive. Increasing bandwidth allocation without addressing how your existing resource is being used is also expensive in terms of opportunity cost and operating inefficiencies. The third option is to consider WAN optimization. The big problem with WAN optimization is that decision makers frequently see this as a "new project" and that it is incurring incremental cost.
That said, WAN optimization has several, very powerful financial and operating arguments to back it up. The first argument is that WAN optimization enjoys a very short payback period. It is typical for payback periods to be in the area of 9 months, and thereafter the company is saving costs into the future. WAN optimization is also a relatively short project from inception to implementation. Whilst there are appliances which can be used to accelerate network traffic and provide effective load-balancing, the bulk of the implementation involves looking at existing traffic. Much of the traffic on a network is duplicated or redundant, for instance CIF protocols are very "chatty" however, much of the back and forth movement of data is not required, yet it is taking up bandwidth.By focusing on these chatty networks and redundant protocols, a great deal of traffic can be eliminated from the network completely. A further illustration of making far better use of existing assets is in patching.
Contemplate a distant place of work with one hundred users Microsoft concerns a protection patch which wants to be downloaded throughout all the devices. A typical circumstance is for users best log in and get a communication directing them to obtain the patch from a central server - this final results in one hundred downloads throughout the WAN. A far better way of updating is to have a single consumer obtain the patch and then have it saved regionally - subsequent patch downloads are then created from neighborhood storage and do not include placing traffic onto the network.
It is also typical for a huge part of existing bandwidth to be introduced right after a WAN optimization has been performed. This precludes the want for further bandwidth obtain, but it also opens the doorway to the implementation of bandwidth hungry deployments which enhance business productiveness and further cost cost savings, this sort of as VoIP answers.
