Enterprise WAN Management

Every organization today is pressurizing their IT department to provide more

solutions to save costs. Some of the most common answers being given to cater to

this demand are to deploy video conferencing, VoIP, and different types of

collaborative applications. This is not surprising, considering that travel and

communication form a significant portion of every organization's budget. While

these solutions can indeed bring about considerable cost savings, they will

really stress your WAN infrastructure. Given this perspective, every CIO needs

to add WAN optimization and management to his strategy for combating the

slowdown, if not already done.

The WAN infrastructure itself consumes a significant portion of every CIO's

IT budget, which can't be ignored. So one part of the strategy is to optimize

your WAN links to ensure that they're ready to take on the load of new services.

This itself can lead to considerable cost savings. Moreover, the benefits of

doing this would be visible immediately. For instance, after a deep analysis,

you discover where the bandwidth is being mis-used and put a stop to it. The

results of this would be immediately visible, in terms of faster response time

over the WAN links. It would also be easy to calculate which additional services

can you load onto the spare bandwidth.

The other part of the strategy is to enhance the WAN infrastructure, in case

it's not able to handle more applications and services. So you discover that

your existing WAN links don't have any room for deploying VoIP services. This

would require exploring additional investments into more WAN equipment like WAN

accelerators, VPN servers, higher bandwidth, etc. The ROI on this would not be

immediately visible, but would have to be calculated. So you would have to

analyze your existing voice communication cost, and then compare it with the

cost of deploying VoIP over your WAN infrastructure. Likewise, you would have to

do for introducing other services like video conferencing, DR and BCP, branch

office automation, etc.

In this story, we've tried to tackle both sides of the picture by giving you

a mix of theoretical as well as practical advice. In theory, we've covered

different types of VPN solutions available for enterprises today as well as a

deep drill-down into QoS aspects. Today, there are so many applications that can

be deployed over a WAN, making it essential to have a thorough understanding of

QoS.

On the practical side, we've talked about how to deploy different kinds of

VPN solutions from the Open Source and the commercial world. We've taken various

scenarios where they can be deployed. Plus, another key element in most WANs

today are the accelerators, or devices that enable faster communication over WAN

links. We've reviewed some of the best WAN accelerators out there, and even put

down essential things you must know before buying one for your organization.

Besides these, we've covered many other key aspects about WAN management and

optimization. For instance, today every CIO or WAN manager is grappling with

trying to determine how much bandwidth is used up by different types of services

like voice, and video. We've done some in-depth tests in our lab to bring you

some answers.

We hope our story helps you make your organization's communication more

efficient and effective. In case you have any questions about WAN management,

then feel free to put them up on

http://forums.pcquest.com.