WAN Optimization: What You Really Need To Know

The wide area network (WAN) is a widely used, but terribly neglected, IT asset. For most companies, the WAN is the cause of many application performance woes. That's where WAN optimization — sometimes referred to as WAN acceleration — comes in. It improves application performance across a distributed network. But the different optimization techniques are confusing; the landscape is too crowded and common sense is often abandoned during deployments. Here we discuss the most commonly asked questions to wade through the hype and avoid a knee-jerk reaction to WAN optimization.