A short guide to a faster WAN   First published: June 2007

  The majority of businesses deploy wide area networks (WANs) to connect the remote parts of the business back to centralised resources
For most a private network is unaffordable so they rely on virtual private networks across shared public infrastructure, predominantly the internet

 

 Internet traffic continues to grow apace, doubling in volume and speed every two years
The applications driving this growth such as voice and video communications are more bandwidth hungry

 

  Achieving high performance across public networks is paramount for ensuring individuals and business processes are productive
This requires getting access to priority bandwidth – which has a cost – and  making sure that employees are using that bandwidth productively

  Unnecessary traffic needs to be stopped
This includes junk email and unproductive end-user activity on the internet but also ensuring that business applications running over the WAN are not too chatty

  The “wanted” traffic needs to be accelerated
Using compression, local caching, stream splitting and other techniques it is possible to accelerate “good” data to remote users and reduce the overall use of bandwidth

 

  Don’t try and do it all at once, address the fundamentals first
Make sure the best affordable connections are in use, that they are secure and reliable, that the whole network is moving wanted data as quickly as possible and that employees are not wasting time online

 

Quocirca is a leading primary research and analysis company with native language research capabilities across the whole of Europe, along with North America and the Asia Pacific region.

Full report available free of charge, click here [Registration required]