WAN OPTIMIZATION AND SECURITY
As organizations and employees become more distributed, the productivity of users in branch and remote offices becomes increasingly important to the success and growth of the business as a whole. All users need fast, secure access to critical applications wherever they are working; at headquarters, in branch and remote offices, or when traveling.
Conversely, for ease of management, enhanced security and compliance, the trend is to consolidate (or outsource) critical applications and servers to fewer, centralized locations. This simplifies server and application administration but often creates performance problems for distributed users. In many cases, a centralized application is a poorly performing application.
The combination of long distances between users and applications, narrow-bandwidth/ latency-prone network pipes, applications and protocols stretched beyond their design limits, all conspire to produce poor application performance at remote sites. Applications that are bandwidth-hungry or response time-sensitive exacerbate the problem.
WAN optimization solutions accelerate application performance to these remote and traveling users to LAN speeds. In addition, integrated security functionality ensures that remote users remain within corporate usage policies and are protected from external threats while accessing the Internet and externally-hosted applications.
The business benefits of a WAN optimization project include:
- increasing user productivity by faster delivery of applications and data to remote users
- saving operational expenditure by reducing WAN usage
- saving operational expenditure by allowing remote offices to connect directly to the Internet instead of backhauling to regional headquarters
- reducing external IT threats by securing remote and traveling users
- easing conformance to regulatory compliance
Blue Coat's WAN optimization systems also include Internet security functions such as web filtering, logging, web anti-virus, spyware blocking and peer-to-peer blocking. This allows organizations to consolidate WAN optimization and web security into one device. The appliances can be deployed transparently into the network as no change is needed in the current infrastructure configuration and policies.
For More Information (link to http://www.bluecoat.com/solutions/businessneeds/wanoptimization)
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