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Wide areas networks (WANs) are essential to the majority of businesses, connecting remote locations and individuals back to centralised IT resources. But as the network is expected to handle more bandwidth intensive applications such as voice and video it is essential to ensure the WAN usage is well managed ? eliminating unwanted traffic and accelerating business content.
- 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
Conclusions
A high performance WAN is a key part of the foundation on which today's businesses are built. It enables flexible working, which increasingly carries an environmental message, underpins sound business processes and enables effective communications within organisations and with customers, partners and suppliers. Failure to address WAN performance issues will be to the detriment of most other areas of a business's activity.
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The congested internet The commercial world has undergone a revolution in the last 15 years driven by the direct electronic connection of most businesses and many consumers via the internet.
This revolution has changed the way various entities communicate with each other, allowed more flexible working practices and enabled the creation of whole new business models. Such breakthroughs are not new. The development of the motorcar in the early 20th Century can be said to have achieved all the same things, but that revolution created problems. The roads the motorcar needed to move around became congested. Employees, having been given the freedom to live further from work, now faced the frustration of commuting. Sales reps, able to extend their range further and wider also struggled with the increasing traffic, and the vans and trucks delivering goods could also become delayed by congestion. Still no one is seriously contemplating abandoning road transport as the primary means of moving goods and people around. But there are ways to make it more efficient: road tolls, cutting non-essential journeys, car sharing and so on.
The internet is going through pretty much the same experience, but at a much faster pace. According to the American Institute of Physics, traffic on the internet has doubled in volume and speed every two years since 1990. But behind these impressive growth rates there are problems with handling the volume of internet traffic and maintaining quality of service. In short, there is more congestion on the internet whilst at the same time it is becoming ever more important for business communications.
Few doubt that the adoption of the internet protocol (IP) as a global networking standard has been a good thing. It has allowed all sorts of applications to be IP enabled and make use of shared networks. As well as data traffic generated by computers, this now includes much voice and increasingly video and television traffic, both of which have to date largely run over other proprietary networks.
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