Today, the need for instant communication is considered critical for businesses to remain competitive. Sales orders have to be placed immediately to meet tight delivery times or quarter-end goals. Manufacturing needs up-to-the minute information to schedule its processes. Forecast data has to be delivered quickly and efficiently. Development groups have to share files and applications effortlessly so that collaboration will not be hindered. Offices around the world require instant access to data and applications, and also must be able to supply input to critical enterprise applications.

In this day and age, employees are distributed across various branch offices and are typically connected to enterprise applications and data via the corporate WAN–the lifeline to the data center or corporate headquarters.

Many enterprises and organizations, however, are finding that the WAN has become inadequate for providing the access and interactivity needed for critical applications–centralized or Internet-based. Organizations are finding that this problem has led to significant productivity issues, a reduced capacity to effectively serve customers, a loss of ability to transact business in real-time and/or a decline in employee morale.

While assuming that such problems stem from lack of sufficient bandwidth is natural, adding more bandwidth usually does little to alleviate the problem–and puts organizations on a path to WAN upgrade addiction. Most of the issues are caused by latency problems due to the distances between locations.

With so many Web and file services applications using “chatty” communication protocols, the time for a round-trip communication exchange becomes significant. A Web page made up of 30 objects may take 10 or more roundtrips to transfer all of the information. A one-megabyte file transfer requires more than 250 round trips. If each leg of the trip involves the distance between Singapore and Los Angeles, hundreds of round trips for each transaction adds a significant delay.

Traffic control

First-generation WAN optimization solutions concentrated on applying acceleration to WAN traffic. While this helped speed the transfer of files and other traffic, it also accelerated undesirable traffic, such as spyware communication, viruses and pop-up advertising, as well as non-business applications, such as music and video downloads.

Today, solving the distributed application problem usually involves a combined approach of stopping malicious traffic, minimizing the impact of non-business critical but acceptable traffic, and accelerating business-critical applications using techniques that overcome the effect of latency due to distance and chatty applications.

One issue that organizations struggle to control is the unauthorized use of certain applications by employees during work hours. Such activities include downloading large files, such as movies or music, or watching streaming video. Even small applications can perform slowly and consume bandwidth due to incessant chatter and large downloads across the network.

For instance, a computer with spyware will generate “phone home requests” as the application tries to connect with its origin server, and can amount to significant traffic across the WAN. Video embedded on Web sites can also create problems. Many sites now add video to their Web content; sometimes this video starts automatically as soon as someone goes to the site. Video progressively downloaded over HTTP produces a significant amount of traffic across the WAN. All of these applications or activities must be managed, prioritized and, ideally, have their effect on the network mitigated.

Applications and content that are acceptable to the organization, but not business-critical, need to be prioritized intelligently. This should be done on the basis of who the user is and what privileges she has. It should also be done with full understanding of the application and the specific interaction the user is requesting to have with it. In addition, it should be done using fine-grained policy control to avoid inflexible, “draconian” decisions that unnecessarily hamper the employee or organization.

For example, certain employees might need access to streaming media from external sites for business purposes. Others may be allowed access only during certain hours or to a certain amount of bandwidth. Some employees should be able to access external video feeds. Companies may have various policies over who is allowed to use instant messaging and whether or not it can be used as a means to transfer files.

Another important part of a WAN optimization solution is having the ability to mitigate the effect of allowed applications. For instance, if the organization does not want to restrict an employee’s ability to watch on-demand video from a site such as YouTube.com or CNN, it can try to minimize the effect on the organization’s Internet connection and WAN.

Caching the content at the firm’s Internet gateway or locally at the branch office will enable video to be served without impacting the WAN or Internet gateway. All sorts of content, including software updates, can be locally cached to reduce traffic across the WAN or Internet gateway.

Acceleration and control

In the past, security and acceleration were once fierce opposites. Organizations had previously sacrificed performance to gain security. Similarly, performance gains have come at the expense of security. Organizations no longer have to make such sacrifices. In addition, organizations are finding that branch offices need both security and acceleration.

Many organizations still have a centralized Internet gateway, and they backhaul Internet traffic to and from the branch offices for security reasons. That means that all Internet traffic is backhauled over costly WAN links to remote users–a model that is quickly changing.

According to Gartner, many organizations will shift away from backhauling Internet traffic over the next several years. Enterprises will increasingly use the Internet as a cost-effective WAN substitution to access internally and externally hosted applications. Once this happens, the security and control issues at the branch intensify–necessitating “Internet gateway-like” functionality at the branch office.

The alternative to a WAN bandwidth upgrade is WAN optimization for all kinds of business traffic, with a high degree of policy control. A unified architecture should be implemented that extends application performance and security measures to all points in the organization.

Today’s WAN optimization appliances that, combine smart caching, compression, protocol optimization, load balancing and other modifications with the promise to improve network and application performance without the need for fatter pipes, while keeping data secure.

A WAN optimization solution accelerates the full range of business-critical application traffic and provides appropriate levels of control. Such a solution should be able to manage SSL-encrypted traffic from externally hosted Software as a Service applications, as well as on-demand or live streaming video. The solution should also enforce corporate policies by controlling content and applications, as well as protecting against application-level threats like spyware, viruses and other malicious or unauthorized software.

Wayne Neich is a regional sales manager for Blue Coat Systems, Sunnyvale, Calif.

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