The application of various strategies and security measures to an organization's IT infrastructure as an effort to advance WAN (Wide Area Network) availability, protection from potential threats and overall performance. Through WAN optimization efforts, a network can provide actionable scalability as traffic increases while increasing global connectivity.
Whether users are accessing business-critical applications and information that is hosted locally or in remote locations, WAN optimization can help provide reliable network performance. Efficiently distributing applications and data across a network is one of the most crucial factors to achieving the highest level of functionality possible. With properly handled wide area network traffic, companies can monitor, analyze and manage potential problems caused by heavy or sudden increases in traffic. These issues can include simple traffic overloads that cause lagging retrieval and bottlenecks, as well as connectivity failures and server crashes. Along with traffic management, providing application-level security to users is also vital to obtaining optimal WAN performance. By maintaining a high-level of availability and supporting a strategy for intrusion protection, vulnerabilities to an organization's network can be safeguarded so as not to expose business-sensitive information to malicious traffic. By the combined efforts of these and other techniques, WAN optimization can help increase performance and maintain availability.