Definition
WAN Acceleration

Techniques applied by a company to its WAN (Wide Area Network) in order to optimize the availability and delivery performance of business-critical applications and information accessed by users worldwide. In addition to enhancing performance, these strategies help to improve the scalability and security of a business's network as well.

Companies that host business applications and information in a central location and deliver that data across a WAN to remote locations should pay special attention to how network traffic is controlled and delivered. If these processes are not handled in an efficient manner, business transactions can be left incomplete and remote users left unproductive. Implementing WAN acceleration using multi-homing can improve the network connections of multiple users by ensuring optimal application delivery, security, reliability and scalability. Multi-homing efficiently manages bandwidth expenditure, traffic direction and security protocols to provide a high-level of performance for users connected from a variety of locations. By protecting against traffic overloads and link failures that can cause bandwidth bottlenecks or server crashes, WAN acceleration increases network connectivity and application response times. With effective security measures in place, an accelerated network will also be protected from the variety of threats and attacks that malicious traffic may otherwise cause.