Supercharge your network connections with WAN optimisation
Do programs at your branch offices run sluggishly? Are employees complaining that the network's too slow to work from home? Wide area networking (WAN) optimisation could be the answer...
Where’s the poor performance coming from?
Applications that use data stored in your head office often run slowly from a branch office or home. The most common reason for such poor performance is network congestion – more data being forced through your network connection than it can cope with. Unsurprisingly, the result is usually a traffic jam.
But some delays aren't caused by lack of capacity at all. The culprit could be "chatty" applications that constantly send small amounts of data back and forth over the network. Waiting for these round trips to be completed is what causes delays.
Find out more about our solutions for business WAN.
What can WAN optimisation offer?
In a word, speed. WAN optimisation uses a few clever tricks to let your network and the applications that use it run up to ten times faster. These include:
- Data compression – reducing the traffic that's sent and received
- Caching – fetching data you want before you need it so you don't have to wait
- Traffic shaping – reserving network capacity for your most important programs
- Application optimisation – eliminating delays caused by unnecessary traffic
What you need to make it work
If you want to try WAN optimisation, you'll need a WAN Optimisation Controller (WOC) at your head office to get you started. You can buy a WOC hardware appliance, or run WOC software on a server. You'll need another WOC at each of your branch offices.
Employees who work while travelling or from home can use WOC software installed on their computers to speed up the connection to your head office.
Other ways to speed up your network
- Boost your bandwidth
Adding more network capacity is an obvious solution. You'll have to pay more for this but it could ease the traffic jams and get your data flowing again. Be warned though, traffic has a tendency to increase to fill whatever capacity's available – so don't be surprised if you don't notice too much difference.
- Plan your backups out of hours
Business hours are the rush hour for your network connection, when network speed is slowest. You can ease congestion by scheduling overnight backups from your branch office to your head office.
- Keep virus protection up to date
PCs infected with malware can often quietly hog network traffic as the virus or Trojan takes up resources and slows performance. Keep licences and antivirus protection up to date rigorously.
