Datasheet
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• Contention: According to a recent survey, enterprise IT managers are running more than
100 applications across their WAN connections. Approximately one-quarter of these
applications are considered business-critical. When these applications compete for a
fixed amount of bandwidth, all of them suffer.
• Security: Nearly 60 percent of today’s workforce operates outside corporate
headquarters. These employees need secure access to business-critical applications
and other centralized resources. In many cases, secure access must also be extended to
“outsiders” such as customers and business partners.
• Manageability: You can’t manage what you can’t see. If IT managers don’t know what’s
happening across the distributed enterprise, they can’t see clearly how to improve
performance. Historically, monitoring and reporting application performance on the
WAN has been difficult to do on a corporate IT budget. With application licenses, WAN
services, and headcount consuming most of the budget, it’s time for a better solution.
Addressing Enterprise Initiatives
Each of these challenges impacts the major initiatives facing IT managers today. These
initiatives, which essentially define the evolving enterprise, include the following:
• Web-enabling: Off-the-shelf (SAP, Oracle) and custom-developed client/server
business applications to lower branch office management costs and simplify
connections by replacing private lines with virtual private networks (VPNs).
This application migration, however, raises a number of security, bandwidth, and
transaction completion issues. While client/server applications use proven methods to
ensure that transactions have been completed successfully, the Web-enabled versions
lack any such technique. Plus, they may be accessed over the public Internet, presenting
security and capacity problems.
• New applications: Continually deployed both to reduce costs and to deliver new
capabilities to end users. VoIP, for example, represents a cost-effective communication
tool, while Microsoft’s SharePoint and converged applications such as combined voice/
Instant Messenger (IM) are being used to enhance collaboration.
Applications like VoIP, however, have special requirements such as extremely low
latency, jitter, and loss. As congestion grows, VoIP calls could be dropped, making it
absolutely critical for IT to set and enforce quality of service (QoS) policies, and closely
monitor activity on WAN connections.
• Server centralization: While an eective cost-cutting initiative, server centralization also
presents performance issues for users accessing centralized applications from remote sites.
IT must be able to guarantee sucient performance for remote users, and understanding
how WAN links behave, and how applications perform over these links, is critical.
• Regulatory compliance: Simply put, it’s difficult for IT to gather and retain email and
data for the required length of time if the enterprise is a patchwork of diverse devices
and point products distributed around the globe.
• Data replication: As businesses establish backup data centers farther away from the
primary location, they are typically unable to deliver the high-bandwidth, low-latency
services that permit the continuous replication of data that is so critical to disaster
recovery and high availability. Enterprises must overcome this obstacle to avoid data
loss and enable smooth cutover in the event of a disaster.