EDITORIAL Publisher Dominic De Sousa COO Nadeem Hood
Speed up that WAN
Commercial Director Richard Judd richard@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9126
IT managers in the region are often inclined to throw bandwidth at their network performance issues. Most of them are caught in the vicious web of leased lines and costly WAN charges, and thanks to their propensity to add more, bandwidth today represents a significant chunk of operational costs for organisation. Now, with CFOs going through everything with a fine-toothed comb, IT managers are being forced to crack their network performance issues without buying more bandwidth. As more and more businesses looking to carry out business at wire speed, it is an imperative for the IT organisations to keep pace and make sure that their systems move those mission-critical apps at blazing speeds across the wide area network. This is where WAN optimisation steps in, which is garnering a great deal of attention lately. As employees become more mobile and distributed, the choice is either to increase bandwidth to your remote-sites, which can cost you an arm and leg, or clamp down on traffic on those lines without reducing their efficiency. That can be quite tricky unless you have WAN optimisation tools at your disposal. There is a caveat though. To understand what type of optimisation is needed, IT managers need to have completely visibly to the network and application traffic, which is sorely lacking in most organisations in the Middle East. Whenever users complain about things being slow, the network usually has nothing to do with it. This is why it is important for network folks to have tools to snoop in and find out exactly where the problems reside. Otherwise, you are left groping in the dark for the solution. Before you get on the WAN optimisation bandwagon, make sure you analyse your network traffic first to figure out what WAN performance each type of traffic requires. It would be a good idea to minimise encrypted traffic because it cannot be optimised as well as unencrypted traffic. And finally, do yourself a favour- check out vendor best-case performance claims in your environment before you take the plunge.
CMO Kimon Alexandrou kimon@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9149 EDITORIAL Dave Reeder dave@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9106 Senior Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevan@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9109 ADVERTISING Group Sales Manager Rajashree R Kumar raj@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9131 CIO PROGRAMMES CIO Programmes and Events Lead Kavitha Rajasekhar kavitha@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9132 Strategic Marketing Services Lead Sreejith Nambiar sreejith@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9133 MARKETING AND CIRCULATION Database and Circulation Manager Rajeesh M rajeesh@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9147 PRODUCTION AND DESIGN Production Manager James P Tharian james@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9146 Designer Froilan A. Cosgafa IV froilan@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9107 DIGITAL www.cpilive.net www.networkworldme.com www.cpidubai.com Webmaster Tristan Troy Maagma troy@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9141 Web Designer Jerus King Bation jerus@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9143
Jeevan Thankappan Senior Editor jeevan@cpidubai.com
Web Developer Elizabeth Reyes eliz@cpidubai.com
Published by www.networkworldme.com
| Issue 143 | February 2011
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