At a time when day-to-day use of wide area networks (WANs) has become as ubiquitous as computers, many large organisations are painfully realising that most of the protocols used on these networks were originally designed for Local Area Networks (LANs). A rising number of frustrated users gripe about the inefficiency over WANs. The lack of fit only increases the number of unfruitful interactions between the headquarters and branches.

With the trend veering towards centralisation of servers, higher percentage of users working from remote offices, and greater sharing of data with business partners and outsourcing of computing services, more data needs to travel greater distances between the content and the user.

What organisations need is a facility that allows them to squeeze more traffic onto WAN links, set priorities for users and applications and remove the serial requests and responses that cause much of the crippling delay.

For resellers and value added resellers (VARs), this is an opportunity to guide IT managers in the right direction. Their objective should be to speed up specific applications to make life easier for overburdened support desks.

Let's remember that a lot of data being sent across WAN links isn't even necessary. A lot of the clogging happens due to inappropriate web surfing, entertainment streams and repeated requests for the same data (such as multiple people being copied on an email with a large attachment). Any system that accelerates data without making policy decisions to remove wasteful content is going to be busy accelerating viruses, wasteful web surfing, spyware and spam. And none of these adds to IT efficiency.

IT managers can give remote users the performance they need by reducing WAN usage. They can do this in a variety of ways: by placing devices at either end of WAN connections; applying multiple technologies to solve the remote office conundrum; by deciding which data to block altogether; by applying different types of caching and compression to reduce the amount of traffic; by hiding the inefficiencies of protocols; and by removing the serial requests and responses; and by prioritising requests based not just on protocols, but on users and destinations.

The result is lower IT support costs, happier users and greater productivity. For instance, if a user tries to open a Microsoft word file on a remote server, an appliance can recognise the initial steps of the transaction and check whether it already has the requested content. If the answer is yes, there is nothing to worry. If not, the appliance requests the whole file instead of the CIFS requests of 4KB at a time. The trick is to use byte caching for repeated strings of content and compress the traffic from the central site. Moving servers to central sites reduces the amount of maintenance and support that branch offices need—and frees up servers for other purposes. This kind of centralisation represents a compelling business argument.

It is a trend that resellers and VARs should be aware of, as it will again bring forth the question of how WAN performance improvements can be achieved. It is a chance for resellers to be the champion in what is effectively a ‘make or break' issue in the running of critical business applications by the largest organisations.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nigel Hawthorn is vice president (marketing), Blue Coat Systems. The California-based Blue Coat secures Web communications and accelerates business applications across the distributed enterprise is ranked #1 by IDC in the secure content and application delivery market.