* Application performance degradation over WAN unacceptable, report says
IT managers must take a hard look at how they deliver applications over the wide area, because enterprise companies can no longer accept application performance degradation as a fair tradeoff to supporting remote workers.
That’s the conclusion of a recent paper from NetsEdge Research Group that asserts that distributed end users should be able to expect the same QoS from business-critical applications such as SAP that end users at headquarters receive. And business managers must demand that IT deliver the same levels of performance to ensure the applications are meeting business service criteria.
“The network delivery of Web-enabled applications plays an increasingly critical role in business operations,” writes Peter Christy, principal at NetsEdge Research Group. “The emergence of this new category of applications and their strategic importance to enterprises have had a profound impact on the importance of WAN communications.”
In the past, the fact that remote users couldn’t fully use applications didn’t concern business managers because those applications hadn’t been designed for distributed use, NetsEdge explains. But today, the Internet and the Web have changed that perspective.
“If some users can’t successfully use the application, the entire deployment is at risk,” Christy writes.
Making the application work for all participants means ensuring consistent performance over even some of the “worst WAN links,” the report states. The applications that serve worldwide user populations need to perform for even the “worst served users.”
NetsEdge finds that “cheap and plentiful” bandwidth isn’t the answer. Better business processes are not the answer. For enterprise companies to ensure they are getting the best performance for the least equipped user, they must invest in WAN optimization technologies.
“These applications and the business benefits that they bring change the importance of the WAN greatly, and in fact, make investment in WAN optimization of direct strategic value to enterprise IT and business strategy,” Christy concludes in the report.
