With the rise of new technologies, such as cloud, on top of the new and varied ways customers and employees interact with your company, today’s networks need to be in peak condition to meet these new demands.  Applications are now delivered from many different sources putting more stress on your wide area network (WAN).  It isn’t as simple as delivering the necessary information or application to an endpoint – delivery must also be fast, at any time and efficient.

Wide area Network Optimization Tools are used widely to increase visibility and control and to optimize bandwidth to improve performance. BizTech Magazine outlines the following ways WAN optimization tools typically work below:

• Compression – Network optimization tools use an algorithm to remove redundancy from data flows reducing size
• Deduplication – This is another form of data compression, but it conserves bandwidth by reducing the number of bytes transferred between endpoints
• Transport Control Protocol (TCP) Acceleration – this technique focuses on the network itself.  TCP Acceleration works to improve throughput on an internet link
• SSL Optimization – this method allows SSL traffic to be accelerated across the internet connection without sacrificing security
• Protocol Optimization – older protocol may not work well over WAN. This process adjusts these older protocols to reduce latency
• Application Optimization and Control – this technique is application related and focuses on ways to improve performance and delivery of applications

Khalid Raza on Network World further adds, “the primary role of WAN optimization is to overcome application performance bottlenecks associated with network architectures that were designed for data center, not cloud-based, applications.” As your IT environment expands, network optimization tools can help you achieve your best performance and manage the peaks and valleys of demand.