WAN Acceleration is as relevant today as it’s ever been. While it may not be necessary in all scenerios, it is critical for efficient business practice in many situations. So, who needs it? WAN Acceleration, from the beginning, addressed two major areas:
- By removing 80-90% of data off your WAN connections, we were giving bandwidth back.
- By addressing network latency through deduplication, compression, and transaction prediction, we were making the server feel like it was just down the hall.
Bandwidth is now available in massive amounts, so giving back bandwidth is typically not a use case. But, network latency still exists and is the cause of slow access for remote users. Offsetting the negative effects of network latency is still a valid reason to look at WAN Acceleration.
So, where does WAN Acceleration fit today?
- Home office users. Home office VPN connections typically see network latency between 20 and 30 milliseconds. There is a significant difference in speed for the home office employee, versus an employee working from the datacenter.
- Cloud Datacenters. If you have moved files, applications, or entire datacenters to the Azure or AWS cloud, you likely will have high latency. Ping the server. If you have network latency over 20ms, WAN Acceleration can have a significant, positive impact on productivity. In addition, since you pay for data you take from the cloud, removing 80-90% of that data from the line can save you significant money over time.
- Citrix and RDP environments. These environments require two machines for each employee. Utilizing WAN Acceleration for a single laptop the user can use wherever the user has access to an internet connection provides flexibility, uniformity, and consistency in the connection, allowing the end user to work from anywhere.
- Remote offices with network latency above 20ms. Some remote offices have access to high speed, low latency fiber connections. Generally, these offices would not benefit from WAN Acceleration. For offices that don’t have this available, WAN acceleration can increase productivity for the employees in those offices. WAN Acceleration is commonly implemented where needed and does not require it be implemented in every office or for every connection.
- SD-WAN networks. It may seem shocking, but SD-WAN networks often suffer from latency issues. SD-WAN typically removes expensive, private lines from the network design, and replaces with less expensive public internet lines. Typically, these lines, while less expensive, also have higher latency. Creating business overlays allows you to specify what data/services use what connections is a great use case for SD-WAN, but performance can suffer if your network latency is over 20ms. In these situations, SD-WAN and WAN Acceleration are complementary technologies.
Is It Time to Add WAN Acceleration?
Are you ready to get back to the speed of business? Contact us today to optimize your network with WAN Acceleration.