Riding through the financial storm with WAN optimisation 
Paul Serrano
15/05/2009

At a time when the global economy is hit by the titanic waves of the financial tsunami, the need for organisations of all sizes to gear towards increased productivity at a reduced operations cost has never been higher.

Particularly in difficult times as such, many organisations will begin to evaluate various cost-cutting measures in order to weather the storm. However, organisations need to be careful to pursue cost-cutting initiatives that will not negatively impact day-to-day operations or constrain long term growth as a result.

From a business perspective, not only are employees expected to do their job more efficiently than before, it has also become vital for organisations to keep their IT infrastructure up-to-date. Ideally, organisations should not make deep cuts in investments that may possibly jeopardise future growth such as product improvements or the hiring of key personnel. An example of a good investment in technology would be WAN optimisation.

In this article, we will look at 10 key reasons how the deployment of WAN technology can possibly help a company save costs and yet achieve the same level of productivity at the same time.

10 key reasons to use WAN optimisation
1. Prepare the business for the future. WAN optimisation allows businesses to cut costs now without sacrificing the future. Because WAN optimisation is an enabling technology across the complete enterprise, a small investment now can prepare the business to grow rapidly when the time is right. New IT projects can be deployed faster and with better performance across the WAN. This enables the IT department to be more responsive to business needs in good times or bad.

2. Make data protection faster and cheaper. In good times or bad times, data protection is a necessity. Many businesses simply throw more bandwidth at data protection in the hopes that they can replicate and restore an ever-increasing amount of data in an ever-shrinking backup window. Organisations that use WAN optimisation often see that they can accelerate their disaster recovery operations while cutting bandwidth needs at the same time.

3. Enable more productive outsourcing. Outsourcing only really works when the remote staff (often located in far-off parts of the world) can access information and data as if they were local. With WAN optimisation, organisations can enable just that. In addition, they won’t get stuck with requirements to buy large, expensive international links or set up remote infrastructure on the outsourcers’ premises.

4. Use mobility as a cost-savings strategy. Mobility is often considered a way to make employees more productive and get them closer to the customer. But it can also be a cost-savings strategy. Using WAN optimisation software for mobile users allows them to be connected to the enterprise as if they were working in an office. With that level of performance, users can work from the home more frequently and reduce the burden on companies in terms of branch office operating costs and real estate investments.

5. Reduce IT support costs. In a recent Forrester survey, the majority of IT managers reported that application performance was the main user complaint. By simply accelerating the performance of applications over the WAN, IT can simultaneously reduce the strain on support staff and improve productivity.

6. Help company morale. No one likes to hit their head against a brick wall. In down economies, employees still want to work hard but application performance often seems like a barrier to them. This can cause workers to be less productive and therefore less satisfied with their jobs. By using WAN optimisation to accelerate the performance of applications, IT managers can eliminate a key barrier to enabling productive, happy workers.

7. Balance workload – without relocation of workers. Typically big projects rely on staff at the project location, but leverage some to little staff elsewhere. But with WAN optimisation, much of the work can be done remotely, where the staff is located today. Even challenging design tasks requiring significant collaboration can be handled remotely. This eliminates significant cost in travel such as flights, hotels, and transport. In addition, all of this travel time is freed up for staff to actually work on the project without tearing them away from their personal lives.

8. Make virtualisation more successful. Virtualisation is often considered a key cost-savings strategy, but one critical area is often overlooked. If you’re consolidating servers out of a branch office and virtualising them into the data centre, end-user performance problems could kill your project. WAN optimisation enables LAN-like performance over the WAN, allowing branch users to still have the required application performance.

9. Realise the ROI of other investments you’ve already made. WAN optimisation acts like a multiplier to the investments you are making in other projects. Initiatives as diverse as CRM, ERP, disaster recovery, communications platforms, and more benefit from greater performance and less need for distributed IT infrastructure. WAN optimisation makes these new projects perform better over the WAN, accelerate user adoption, and costs less to implement.

10. Cut costs today. WAN optimisation has enabled customers to put off impending bandwidth upgrades for two years or more in some cases. In addition, some companies have been able to decommission existing circuits because of throughput gains. Customers have also been able to avoid router upgrades, enable greater consolidation, and avoid server refreshes. This frees up budget for the bottom line and for other critical projects.

Conclusion
To reiterate, it is paramount that businesses continue to make targeted investments that actually cut costs and prepare for the future through smart investments such as WAN optimisation.

Through WAN optimisation, files that used to take hours to access will now take mere seconds. Further, workers around the globe will also be able to freely collaborate with one another as if they were in the same office, despite geographical and physical boundaries.

Bearing in mind these top tips that have been highlighted, CIOs who take this advice to heart can now present to their board a strategy that delivers savings today and greater opportunity in the future.

- Paul Serrano is Senior Director Marketing, Asia Pacific and Japan, Riverbed Technology.

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