A Guide to WAN Application Delivery for the SME Market

ECESSA
White Paper
A Guide to WAN
Application Delivery for the
SME MarketWhite Paper
IntroductionToday's small-to-medium sized enterprises (SME) are undergoing the same IT evolution as their large enterprise counterparts, only on a smaller scale. For SMEs, WAN reliability, flexible scalability, performance and ease of management are as essential to their WAN infrastructure as they are to a large enterprise. SMEs are able to achieve efficiencies and competitive advantages through the adoption of affordable, yet feature-rich WAN optimization technologies. On the other hand, without suitable technology, they will be competitively disadvantaged. Therefore, choosing the appropriate WAN Optimization solution is critical to ensure efficient WAN infrastructure to meet Organizations choose the today's requirements, while also ensuring the right path for tomorrow's business needs.WAN link performance/cost ratio that best fits their WAN application delivery needs for SMEsneeds; provide complete Until recently, WAN solutions such as multi-homing had been cost prohibitive for SMEs. Today, service provider indepen- advanced WAN Optimization Controllers with link load balancing and failover capabilities are not dence; and eliminate the only affordable, but the integration and consolidation of WAN and/or ISP link load balancing and complexity of network failover, built-in VPN, and firewall provides SMEs with very affordable out-of-the-box solutions.protocols such as BGP. For larger enterprise organizations, integrating "big brand" networking gear is commonplace. However, for SMEs, "big brand" equates to big bucks, with enterprise-specific features that they can't use. Rather, deploying products that are built with the explicit features, performance, reliability and scalability created specifically for the SME market is the answer.In general, businesses of all sizes are inclined to purchase "big brand" products. However, "value" vendors that offer products within the same category can provide the optimal performance, features, reliability and security that SMEs need, with the same functional benefits and affordability.For the large enterprise, "big brand" products come with a high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Ecessa can help SMEs lower their TCO, and create high-performance and scalable WAN infrastructure. Ecessa products have price/performance value for SMEs. Our products are built for SME businesses for dramatically less than the price of "big brand" vendors with features that only large enterprises might use.There are other vendors that offer WAN application delivery products. However, Ecessa's products have the best price/performance value when it comes to rich features, scalability, high-availability, performance, security and ease-of-management - at an affordable price to meet the needs of small-to-medium sized enterprises.
Critical applications delivered over the WANIt has only been within the last few years that businesses have utilized separate systems and services to communicate and transact business with customers, partners and employees. Now, through the widespread adoption of the Internet, the real power of networking is being unleashed, and applications are being developed to harness the growth of the Internet. Traditional applications such as order processing, billing and customer management have been integrated into complete supply-chain web applications. These web applications unify and streamline business processes from previously monolithic client/server applications. This is good news for small-to-medium sized businesses (SME), as web-based applications offer the potential to reduce the need for expensive hardware and quicken time-to-market.However, organizations that deploy web-based applications are facing many challenges. For example, when an application is delivered over the WAN and/or ISP link, it is not uncommon that the link cannot handle the increased traffic load effectively. The source of these varied problems is continually associated with high traffic volumes, limited bandwidth resources and ISP outages. Despite existing budgets for IT-related equipment and services, web applications may not deliver the expected improvements in performance, scalability and efficiency when delivered over the WAN.The diversity of today's workforce and the increase in remote branch offices, road-warriors and telecommuters are a direct result of the benefits of the Intern... [download for more]