WAN: a new study shows application acceleration is not enough for enterprises

[Marketwire] A new research report by Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE: HHS), Application Delivery over the WAN: Acceleration Alone is Not Enough, revealed that the inability to prevent performance issues before end-users are impacted is the top challenge for managing application performance over the WAN for 60% of organizations surveyed. Additionally, organizations reported that the amount of their WAN traffic increased by the average of 65% over the last 12 months.

"Research shows that organizations seek WAN optimization and application acceleration solutions that allow them to achieve several goals: optimize Total Cost of Ownership, improve ease of use and deployment of technology solutions, reduce the amount of network traffic, improve security of data that is being sent over the WAN and make sure that these solutions can scale," said Bojan Simic, research analyst, Aberdeen. "All Laggard organizations surveyed have some WAN optimization and application acceleration solutions in place, but the research reveals these organizations average only a 2% improvement in network throughput. The majority of these organizations are selecting solutions that are not the best fit for their needs while investing significant resources in acquiring these products. Top performing organizations are taking a more systematic approach and building capabilities that allow them to effectively evaluate technology solutions."

Even though 85% of top performing organizations reported that the amount of their WAN traffic increased over the last 12 months, only 43% of these organizations increased capacity of their networks. As opposed to conducting costly upgrades on bandwidth capacity to support increased amount of network traffic, these organizations decided to execute on their top strategic action for managing application performance over the WAN: maximize utilization of existing resources. As a result, not only were these organizations able to improve application response times at the rate 73% higher than that of Laggard organizations, but they were also twice as likely to reduce their cost of bandwidth services (as a percentage of total IT spend).

A complimentary copy of this report is made available due in part by the following underwriters: Blue Coat Systems, Cisco, Exinda Networks, Expand Networks and Riverbed. Obtain a complimentary copy of the report at http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?cid=5871.